


Eidolon

by oxymoronic



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Knight Rises (2012), Inception (2010)
Genre: Chaptered, Crossover, Established Relationship, M/M, Medium Length, Minor Violence, Original Character(s), Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 03:12:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/580662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoronic/pseuds/oxymoronic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Arthur and Eames agree to a job on  Bruce Wayne, they have no idea just how completely it will go wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For Starling Girl; thanks for lending me your pen. Thank you also to my beta and all my other cheerleaders. I'm sorry it's taken so long to post! (Took exactly a month to write, from the 2nd September to 2nd October, beta-reading and editing since then.) Name of "the bleeding effect" lovingly stolen from _Assassin's Creed_.
> 
> As far as I'm aware, no warnings apply. Please let me know if there is anything you find distressing and I shall adjust the warnings duly. I've been working from a dodgy copy of the film and the shooting script, so sincere apologies if I've written anything differently to how it actually is. Also apologies for any Briticisms that didn't get picked up in editing.
> 
> This story works its way through both _The Dark Knight Rises_ and _Inception_ and thus contains **spoilers** throughout both films.
> 
>  **ETA (16/03/13)** : the lovely starling-girl has [arted](http://starlinggirlartsthings.tumblr.com/post/45526341796/eidolon-art-for-this-most-wonderful-of-fics) _Eidolon_!
> 
>  **ETA #2 (20/01/14)** : the wonderful [mercuria](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuria/pseuds/mercuria) is turning _Eidolon_ into a podfic! Chapter one is now available [here](https://app.box.com/s/6rh7lpf54qyjbkcbw4es). Other chapters will be added to the relevant chapter notes, so do keep an eye out and go thank them for their fantastic work!

They meet Alfred Pennyworth for the first time in a small Florentine café. Eames, naturally, has a ubiquitous intimacy with Florence; Arthur is generally unfamiliar with the city save for the essentials, but he knows it to be small, and this – alongside the sparseness of exit routes – is making him tetchy and nervous.

They have spent a day and a half in the city before the rendez-vous, more for Arthur’s peace of mind than any romantic notions (firmly) on Eames’ part; but even after his day of tourism Arthur sees no charm in it, and by the time of the rendez-vous Eames has given up on persuading him. They spend their final afternoon in their Spartan hotel room, Eames reading trashy paperbacks on the veranda, Arthur methodically stripping and cleaning the assorted collection of weaponry hidden under the hotel bed.

The low, heavy heat of afternoon has settled firmly across their shoulders long before they make their way across the piazza towards the tasteless café. It is decorated to the nines in gaudy green and red and equipped with uncomfortable, sticky, plastic chairs, and it is into a pair of these they sink, opposite one another on a table for four. They are handed at length a chilled glass bottle of water by an indifferent waiter, and Eames pours them each a drink.

A few minutes pass by. Neither touches their water. The stale air of the piazza rattles with the raucous clatter of the shops’ shutters sliding down; the noise sets Arthur’s nerves on edge. Eames swipes his thumb along the neck of the bottle, and the condensation tickles his thumb. “He’s late,” he observes, but Arthur says nothing.

Presently, the seat to Eames’ left is filled by an old, tired-looking, grey-haired man, with a glass of rich red liquid in his hand. He stares for a moment at a point behind Arthur’s head, saying nothing; the back of Arthur’s neck prickles with the urge to turn round, but he trains his gaze firmly forward. They wait in silence for a few long, uncomfortable moments, but eventually something in the man’s eyes dulls and he turns his focus to them. “You’re friends of Dom’s, I understand,” he says.

“Yes,” Arthur replies; Eames doesn’t comment.

The man lingers on him for a moment, but he doesn’t press. “Alfred,” he adds, proffering a hand to each of them in turn.

Arthur gives their names in return – their real names, or at least their most intimate, their preferred. Beside him, Eames sits utterly composed, but Arthur can feel the annoyance roiling off him in waves; they’d spent a handful of months crafting a new set of aliases to allow them to work together, and this was meant to be their first airing. Arthur knows Alfred to be a friend of Cobb’s, and thus trusts him implicitly, much to Eames’ distaste.

“And what is it you would like us to do, Mr. Pennyworth?” says Eames, his gracious, blustering charm in obvious contrast to his crude and somewhat rude reveal they know more about their new employer than Arthur had wanted them to admit. It is deliberate, naturally; everything Eames does is deliberate. An eye for an eye. It rankles Arthur’s blood, but he keeps his temper in check.

Alfred hesitates. He’s unperturbed by Eames’ supposed slip; Arthur can tell his nervousness rises from his purpose here, not his audience. “Dom says I can trust you,” he begins, and reaches inside his jacket. He brings out a photograph, which he places face-down on the table between them; he pauses, his fingers splayed across the smooth, white back of the photograph, and his tired old eyes close for a heartbeat before skittering nervously around the piazza. “Christ, I hope I’m doing right here.”

“Dom told me there was a friend you needed help for,” Arthur says, hesitantly, scared to spook him; but Alfred nods, wets his lips, and begins.

“I went to him first, but he said after Phillipa he didn’t do that any longer. There’s a – ” He breaks off, licks his lips again, starts over. “This friend of mine, you see, he’s got himself to a very bad place. The things he does – ” He sighs a little, shakes his head. “And I’ve tried talking, but he won’t hear sense, no matter what happens, not since.” His voice falters yet again; his eyes flitter away.

“And what is it you’d like us to do?” Eames repeats, verbatim, angled a little further towards the table, his eyes serious and focused on Alfred alone. There’s always a change that comes across him in that heartbeat-quick moment he gets interested in a job, and it makes something in Arthur’s blood rush hot on an almost Pavlovian level.

“I need you to show him there’s no future in the life he leads,” Alfred says quietly, his eyes on the table below. “That all he’s doing is constructing himself a world of misery.”

“We’re going to need more than that,” Eames murmurs. “Can you give us a name?”

Alfred pauses once more, and looks up from the chequered table-cloth to stare forcefully, intently into Arthur’s eyes. He seems, eventually, to like what he sees; he sighs, long and low, and flips over the photograph in a single, deft movement.

“Bruce Wayne,” he says, hoarsely. “The Batman.”

 

 

After Alfred leaves Arthur and Eames retire to the riverside and hunt for a spot on the high-walled bank not thickly clogged by tourists. They wander for a while in the late afternoon sun, enjoying the warmth of the air more than the stench from the river, before pausing by a bench well-populated by teenage locals, trusting their low voices and the buzz of the traffic to keep their conversation private.

“It’s a good job,” Eames says eventually, and Arthur knows instinctively that by _good_ here he means _interesting_ , _difficult_ , _challenging_ , as much as _well-paid_ , _safe_ , or the fact that technically they are doing it for a friend.

“It’s a big job,” Arthur counters. “I’d guess we’d need at least a year of dreamtime, if not two.” He pauses, worries a little at his lip. “I’ve never been under that long before,” he admits.

“I have,” Eames replies easily, and stoops to cup a handful of pebbles in his palm. “Yusuf can do it for us. If anything, I thought the nature of it would bother you, not the length.”

Arthur pauses, swallowing back his half-formed words. He looks Eames over in the corner of his eye; he’s trying to be nonchalant, Arthur realises, as if the job is of no interest to him, but Arthur knows him far too well to fall for that. He can spot the taut snap of his shoulders, the restless way his fingers sift through the gravel he’s poured out onto the wall, finding the biggest pebbles to flick into the dirty water below. He sighs noiselessly, letting a stream of cool air slip out from between his teeth. “You have to admit,” he begins, reluctantly, “what he’s asking us to do, the essence of it – ”

“ – is inception,” Eames completes, and pushes the remaining pebbles into the river with a single sweep of his hand. “He wants us to plant an alien idea in Wayne’s mind. For him to come to believe in a different way of life.”

“And that’s impossible,” Arthur says. Though he had hoped it would sound firm he knows very certainly that it does not.

“Improbable,” Eames disagrees amiably, and pushes off the wall to lead them further down the riverside; Arthur follows reluctantly behind. “I take it you yourself have never tried.”

“I’ve heard enough stories from people who have,” Arthur says dryly. “A friend of mine is still wanted in twelve countries for the last attempt. Put his mark in a coma for four years.”

“Then he was clumsy,” Eames says with customary tact. They break apart momentarily to allow a young couple to pass, and Arthur takes the opportunity to roll his eyes. “I saw that,” Eames adds blandly when they meet again, and Arthur briefly battles a smile.

“Come on, then,” he says, ignoring Eames’ last remark. “What’s your cunning plan? Your failsafe formula to the Holy Grail?”

Eames reaches out and catches hold of Arthur’s wrist, stopping him short in the middle of the sidewalk; his skin thrums briefly at the contact, his pulse coming a little faster. Eames raises the index finger of his right hand, and, on Arthur’s palm, draws two boxes, a larger around a smaller. “Two levels,” Eames replies, and Arthur stares at him in shock. “A dream within a dream.”

The city moves around them. Arthur gazes unseeing into the middle distance; something in his blood catches fire, and it rushes hot and noisy around his arteries and veins, thrums loudly in his ears. “Cobb says he managed it once,” Arthur says, hoarsely, and rubs his eyes. “The second level was totally unstable, of course, shook like a leaf at every breath of wind – ”

“ – but he still managed it,” Eames finishes, and lets go of Arthur’s hand.

Arthur lets out a long, low whistle. “Jesus, Eames. That just might work.”

Eames’ smile is wide and brilliant. He catches Arthur’s eye, and says, “I know.”

 

 

They head back to their hotel just as the sunlight fades, diving into a local supermercato to pick up some food on the way; but Eames is restless with inspiration and Arthur won’t have an appetite until he showers the day’s sweat from his skin. Eames is uncommunicative and edgy on their return, but it’s a state of being Arthur’s familiar with. As soon as they land a job Eames always becomes a man whose mind is neither here nor there, and with one like this he’ll be taciturn for days at best.

Arthur showers alone, and on discovering his appetite hasn’t changed he forgoes a silent meal to join Eames on the bed, propped up against the headboard cursorily jotting notes on paper with small, deft movements of his hand.

“We need to find a place of fear,” Arthur says, spread out on his stomach and watching Eames write with heavy eyes. “Some way we can push into the farthest corners of his mind, bring out everything he dreads. Strip him of everything, piece by piece.”

“And kill him,” Eames adds, still scribbling. “We’ll have to kill him, at the end.”

Arthur nods once. “When he no longer welcomes it. When he dreads it instead.”

“An enemy should do the job,” Eames says, and caps his pen, his eyes slightly glazed and far away. “Something made of pure evil, of pure fear. Not beyond logic, but past anything Wayne can reason with. Someone... inexorable. Unconquerable.”

“He thinks he’s unafraid of death,” Arthur murmurs quietly, his eyes drifting shut. “Unafraid of fear, or torture, or pain, or despair.”

Eames runs a hand absently through Arthur’s hair, and adds, softly, “he hasn’t thought it through.”

He falls asleep to the arrhythmic scratch of Eames’ pen, and by the time he wakes Eames has given their villain a name.

 

 

They part company, briefly, to most efficiently cover ground; Eames travels to Lusaka and Yusuf, whose work as a Chemist they have already enlisted from afar; and Arthur goes to Rouen, ostensibly to pick up a PASIV and similar such supplies but by no small coincidence it also happens to be where Dom and Mal are holidaying with the children.

Mal meets him off the tarmac with a miniscule flask of piping-hot Irish coffee and a rather worrisome glint in her eye. Arthur takes one look at her and knows, with a resigned sigh, that he’s going to tell her everything.

She guides them to a local café, and he gives her their plan in brief over lunch and another vat of coffee. “Your interest is purely academic, of course,” he adds dryly, once he’s done.

She smiles sweetly. “Of course,” she agrees, but there’s mischief in her eyes when she ducks her head. “Dom and I are firmly out of that world now.” The hours of argument, and _because of the children_ , go unspoken.

“Eames would be delighted to have you,” Arthur says quietly, after a long pause. “Especially if it’s something Dom Cobb doesn’t want,” he continues with a small smile.

She chuckles lightly. “Maybe I’ll think on it,” she replies, dragging her teaspoon through the foam in her mug. She lets out a little sigh, the spoon dropping from her fingers with a small clink on the cheap china. “The children miss you,” she says, pushing her hair back from her face with a sweep of her hand. “Can you stay long?”

“Not long,” Arthur admits. “But I have a little while.”

 

 

They pick up their Selina Kyle in Moscow, and though she introduces herself to them as Katie Stone considering the fluidity of her Russian he doubts it’s the name she was born with. She’s quiet and thoughtful and more than formidable, and though she matches much of what Arthur had in mind already for Ms Kyle she’s a competent enough Forger to correct the rest.

“The red hair, for instance,” Arthur says, flicking a finger towards her head.

“Very flattering,” Eames agrees, “but too bright, and it’ll look firmly out of place. There’ll be few colours in his world, especially how Arthur will construct it.” His lips twitch slightly. “They’re the both of them rather fond of black.”

Her lips purse a little, and though it could be from amusement Arthur is gripped quite suddenly by the rather real fear she’s going to take off his head. “That shouldn’t be a problem,” she says smoothly. “I’m a natural brunette. Where do you need me to be?”

“Arthur and I are heading to Gotham tomorrow,” Eames replies, shifting in his seat a little. “Forward planning, and the like.”

Katie arches an eyebrow. “Forward planning,” she repeats, deadpan. “That’s not your reputation at all, Mr. Eames.”

“We’ll let you know when you need to join us,” Arthur interjects, aiming at amicable and probably falling short. She sends him a sly look, but doesn’t comment further.

“I like her,” Eames says after they part, muscling their way through the crowded commuter station; they’ve apparently accidentally stumbled into rush hour on Moscow’s Metro.

“I thought you would,” Arthur replies curtly. “Well, she’s on your team far more than she’s on mine. Make sure you take full advantage of her.”

Eames slides him a look; and it cuts through all his layers of pretence, all his bluster, right down to the nerve. “Don’t worry, dear,” he murmurs, “she’s not my type.” He gives Arthur a lazy, sly grin and leaves him stumbling over his own feet in a crowded station. He’s sure he was suave before he met Eames.

 

 

There are few cities in the world in which neither one of them has squandered a bit of property, whether in a card game on the sly or by more legitimate means; and in Gotham it is Eames’ turn to provide a home, a boxy apartment on the fourth floor of a frugally fitted block, heavy on sleek silver metal and icy white. Eames has carried the Spartan décor through to the apartment itself; all rich dark mahogany and reams of glass pressed up against crisp, whitewashed walls.

“And you have a cat,” Arthur deadpans as they come into the lounge and finds the fat, black thing curled up happily on the white leather sofa. “Of course you have a cat. Who even feeds it when you’re not here?” Eames sends him a grin and a shrug, and Arthur rolls his eyes.

They devote a day to Arthur’s work alone, laying out huge, sprawling maps of the city and marking out areas Arthur wishes to visit again before trusting his memory to construct it by heart. The Manor may be more difficult, as Master Wayne is essentially a shut-in; but Alfred has assured them he will construct a sensible excuse to allow Arthur to get a glimpse or two.

“Besides, you’re never going to master every detail, even with a mind like yours,” Eames points out. They’re sprawled out either side of a map of the grounds, the coffee table dragged aside to make room for it on the floor, a glass of water in Arthur’s hand, a glass of brandy in Eames’. “Even with a year’s worth of work it’d be nigh impossible, and we’ve got far less than a year.”

For politeness’ sake, Arthur ignores the backhanded compliment buried in there somewhere and retreats to the kitchen to refill their glasses. They have two days before Katie flies out, and four before Mal joins them; a small team, and the smallness of it is pressing an itch of fear down between Arthur’s shoulderblades. He and Eames have always disagreed on this; Eames prefers tighter units, whereas Arthur usually collects six people or more before he’s happy to turn the PASIV on. He wishes Yusuf could have joined them from Lusaka.

Eames accepts the iced glass gratefully when Arthur returns, his eyes trained on the city map below, retrieved from the bottom of a stack of Arthur’s files and spread haphazardly in place of that of Wayne Manor. “It is a remarkable city,” he says, and takes a swig of his brandy, sucks his teeth slightly at the strength. “Not really to my tastes, though. Far too neatly organised. And _far_ too tidy; since the Dent Act there’s hardly a disreputable person in sight.”

Arthur grins, leaning back against the sofa. “We should take a field trip out to the Narrows sometime. Sure that’ll make you feel right at home.” He resists the urge to close his eyes, still not quite over the kick of the jetlag, and instead sends a quick glance Eames’ way, sat quiet and pensive beside him. He’s ostensibly studying the map before him, but Arthur can tell on instinct his mind is further afield. “Have you decided where you’ll do it yet?”

“Kill him?” Eames shakes his head and balances his empty glass on the relocated coffee-table. “No.”

Normally, ending a heist with the execution of the mark (whilst still in dreamspace, at least) is highly irregular and extremely problematic; the mind is irrevocably programmed to jerk itself out of a dream in which it is killed, and despite considerable time and effort spent on research to try and avert this no considerable advancement has ever been made. Though Yusuf claims his latest draught will apparently help decelerate the effect and give them the chance to get clear on the level above, Wayne will be hot on their heels all the way.

“I’ve given it some thought, though,” he continues, and rubs his eyes. Arthur shoots him a silent, curious look, but swallows his question, trusts him to know his job.

“And Bane?” he asks, instead.

“Almost done,” Eames reassures him, squashing a yawn. “I’ll go down again tomorrow.” He leans back, rubs at tired eyes. “Lord, I’m getting too old for all this. If you handed me the keys to a bungalow in Benidorm tomorrow I’d leap at the opportunity.” Arthur throws him a thoroughly cynical look, but bites back his reply.

 

 

The first time Arthur had ever worked with a Forger, the man had lost his mind.

At the time, the field of dreamsharing was a relatively new one; and many avenues, though mid-exploration, had not been seen through to the end. His name had been Frances Drayhew, and for the sake of their rather slapdash, somewhat rudimentary extraction he had played a man called Matheson, a lowlife, a gambler, a seedy, spiteful little man whom none of them liked much and who was so unlike his counterpart it was almost laughable.

The job appeared to have gone well; they were in and out with a minimum of fuss, all boxes ticked. But Drayhew had woken up and lost the line between himself and Matheson; had no concept where he himself ended and this ugly, dislikeable persona began. He dropped off Arthur’s map within a month, and by the start of the new year his body had washed up in Monte Carlo, where, Arthur later learnt, a man who went by the name of Matheson had made a fool of himself in front of the cartel and all the wrong friends.

It is now known as the bleeding effect, and stories such as Drayhew’s (which are admittedly few and far between) stand as a warning to all competent Forgers to anchor themselves to something solid, no matter how small. Totems help; but Drayhew had had a totem, and in the end it had done him no good at all. Even the best Forgers have to fight the same such effect every once in a while, and Eames is no exception to this rule; Arthur has patiently seen through the weeks where he had woken with a sudden repulsion to seafood, an obsession with Seventies music, the gentle unearthing of a gambling habit that they had both thought firmly in the past.

He is, to put it shortly, an expert at recognising the signs, and every movement Eames makes around their closeted apartment is sending a cacophony of alarm bells clanging in Arthur’s mind. A little tetchiness, a need for privacy, and anger at Arthur’s supposed incompetence are all par for the course when Eames works a job; but they’re exaggerated to such extents that it makes Arthur’s gut churn.

And there are other things, as well. A tendency towards silence. The reduction of his speech to short, choppy, poignant sentences. A heavier weight to his tread, a purposeful, loping gait, a shift of stance so very pronounced, so very unlike Eames Arthur sometimes struggles to recognise him at all. It’s not as if he flinches back from Arthur’s touch, gaze, voice, proximity, but he sometimes looks at Arthur with such vast blankness in his eyes it sends a cool fear straight to Arthur’s soul.

 

 

The night before they meet Mal off the red-eye from L.A., Eames wakes at three a.m., screaming.

They’re hardly strangers to nightmares; neither has had the peaceful life that would afford them that luxury. And though it’s rare for either of them to admit whatever it is they saw, Arthur can tell it’s something new this time, something fresh and raw.

Eames stands on the balcony in silence, leaning on the icy silver rail with his hands clasped. The dark, shrouded city stretches out beneath them, and even at this hour the caterwaul of sirens and the faint, occasional patter of gunfire can be heard. Arthur hands him a glass of cool water, and for a long while neither of them says a word.

“If you need to stop,” Arthur says quietly, after a while, “we can stop. You just have to tell me, and we’ll go.”

Eames stares out into the blackness of the city, and is silent. Then he sighs, rolls his shoulders in a stretch and turns his head. “Thank you,” he says, his voice still scruffy with the hoarseness of sleep. “I will.”

He turns to re-enter the bedroom, and Arthur stands on the balcony alone. He wonders if Eames underestimates Arthur’s adeptness at recognising a lie, and whether the falsehood had been for his sake, or Eames’.

 

 

It’s an icy, quiet day when the four of them stand at Wayne Manor’s wayside, concealed in a clump of gnarled rhododendrons and huffing out hot air to stop their fingers catching cold. The evening slowly darkens, and drops away into night; lights flick on and off inside the mansion, then all falls still. The soft crunch of grass announces Alfred’s approach just as the clock chimes one, and he signals them out of the darkened gardens with a few flickers of a flashlight.

“I’ve given him the sedative, as you said,” Alfred tells them as they clip through the silent mansion, shadows bursting and skittering away from the torchlight. “He’s through here.”

Wayne lies on a stately four-poster in the middle of the room; a series of chairs have been arranged around it. Arthur deposits the PASIV between Wayne’s legs, pulling out the lines and handing them in turn. The tightness of the team – and the necessity of Alfred on even the lowest level, at least to begin with – means that up here in reality they would be unprotected and alone for a good long while in a manner that makes Arthur’s gut squirm.

He knows, rationally, that it will only be really a handful of minutes before Alfred re-emerges in reality; but his nervousness makes him tetchy, agitated. He settles into a seat at Eames’ side, sucks in a deep, slow breath, and, seeing that all seats are filled, depresses the button, his fingers resting lightly on the cool skin of Eames’ hand.

 

 

The first level is intended as nothing but a buffer zone; a means of ensuring a deeper point of penetration into Wayne’s mind is held in the most secure of circumstances, and a chance to let them escape should the occasion call for it. Arthur wakes first, rouses all but Wayne, and whilst Alfred busies himself with Wayne’s breakfast the four of them slink silently away, spend a day stowed away in the furthest vestiges of the library, waiting for the day to pass by and night to fall so they may repeat the process again. Arthur notices, with some concern, the extent to which Eames looks haggard and weatherworn even on this first level.

Bruce Wayne passes an unremarkable day, and it is not long before they walk silently through the dusty halls and back up to Wayne’s bedroom, where Alfred has managed to atypically coax him into a supposed second consecutive night of sleep. It is Mal, this time, who hands the lines round, given the duty of babysitter to their unconscious forms. They have twelve months on the clock down below; their plan, as it stands, should take six at the utmost.

Mal’s lips are caught in a small smile as Arthur settles down to take one himself, forcing still the slight tremble in his hand. “Come home safe,” she murmurs as she hands it to him. She glances at Eames, uncharacteristically quiet and solemn at Arthur’s side. “And bring him back as well.”

He watches her press the button, her sharp eyes fixed on him. He closes his eyes long before the sedative worms its way down the tube and breaches his skin.

 

 

“I must congratulate you on this,” says Eames as they make their way across the rolling countryside, each square inch of turf still technically the property of the Wayne family. Both Alfred and Ms Kyle have been left behind at the Manor; Arthur trusts them to know their parts and act accordingly. “The tone down here is so moody it’s almost morbid. I can’t wait to see what you’ve done with the city.”

Although Arthur accepts Eames’ compliment in silence, he’s quite certain he doesn’t deserve it. As much as he had indeed intended to paint Gotham as a vat of misery, he is almost certain that the majority of the maudlin air comes not from his mind, but Wayne’s. The city itself is almost rancid with it; every silent street corner, every nook and cranny seemingly seeping in despair. If this is how Wayne sees Gotham, Arthur wonders how he can stand living in it.

Arthur has designed them an apartment on the western side of town, and is every bit as rich as Eames’ was not; all sharply-cut Italian leather finishing and wooden fittings decorated in a distinctly Oriental style. Eames raises an eyebrow but says nothing, crosses to the vista laid out before him; a fair enough view, a reasonable neighbourhood. Optimum real-estate for a mid-level cop. “You can’t see Wayne Manor from here,” he notes, propping open the sash window, wrinkling his nose at the waft of stagnant city air that cheerfully oozes in. “That must be a rarity.”

Arthur smiles slightly. “You can see Enterprises H.Q., though,” he says, waving his finger in the vague direction as he heads to check the kitchen. Small handgun hidden under the cutlery tray; a rifle at the back of the tallest cupboard, secreted as planned.

“Ahh, that’ll be the massive great thing in the middle with his name all over it,” Eames calls through from the other room, snorting loudly. “How lovely it must be, to be rich enough that ostentation and vanity become tasteful and élite.”

When he re-enters the lounge Eames has gone still and calm, his gaze pensive and mind far away; Arthur joins him at the window, his arms folded tight. “Whatever you’re planning,” Arthur murmurs, one eyebrow raised, “I don’t like it.”

Eames cracks a small smile. “I thought you wouldn’t,” he replies, glancing at him. “That’s why I haven’t said it yet.”

“Eames,” Arthur says, softly. Eames nods, once.

“Your John Blake,” he begins, slowly, each word deliberate and hesitant. “How close were you planning to get him to Wayne?”

Arthur shrugs. “As close as necessary, I guess. There’s nothing I know that would suggest he’d go for me romantically, if that’s what you mean.”

He shakes his head. “No-o,” he replies, eyes on his feet. “I was thinking more about the technology in that car of his. In his suit.”

Arthur understands him in a heartbeat. He stares at Eames, thunderstruck; he can feel anger crawling across his skin, pushed along with his pulse. “You’re damn right I don’t like it,” he hisses, struggling to keep his voice in check, to keep himself calm. “You want me to _steal_ from him? We’re here because Alfred – ”

“ – is a friend of Cobb’s,” Eames finishes, sending him a cool look. “Whom I owe precisely nothing. Have you even begun to consider the kind of application that technology might have, not just in our line of work but the military and medicine as well? I can think of many a fallen friend whose life – ”

“It was offered to the government, Eames,” Arthur snaps, fast catapulting towards blind rage. “They turned it all down.”

“The American government turned it down,” Eames counters icily. “And that was five years ago. I seriously doubt they were ever shown anything resembling what Mr. Wayne is cavorting around in now.”

A hot, heavy silence falls. They stare at each other in absolute fury; neither is in any way likely to back down. “Alfred trusts me,” Arthur says at last, dangerously calm. “I will not steal from Wayne.”

Eames pushes away from the window, snapping free of Arthur’s gaze. “Fair enough,” he says, quietly, and moves to walk away; but he pauses after the first step, turns towards him ever so slightly. “I wouldn’t keep trying to be honourable in this line of work,” he adds softly over his shoulder, and Arthur can’t place his tone at all; it’s not caustic, or contemptuous, or disdainful. It sounds almost sad. “It can’t last long.”

 

 

Their first month in Wayne’s mind passes much without comment. Arthur begins his role at GPD as Blake; Eames stays home, mostly, learning and relearning his own part, keeping tabs on the illustrious Ms Kyle. After the first month, Katie vanishes entirely; both of them confess to be mildly impressed, despite their foreknowledge of her reputation. At the end of the third, they sit crosslegged on Arthur’s cold, tiled bathroom floor as Arthur runs a razor across Eames’ scalp, his soft, brown hair falling in flurries around them like snowflakes.

Eames begin to disappear into the city for hours at a time; research, he insists, when Arthur questions, and will say nothing more. Arthur himself spends more time at the precinct. He had expected Wayne’s projections to be violent and hostile, but to his surprise they are nothing of the sort, and he falls into the job with alarming ease. As the dream-days drift unremarkably by, he sees less and less of Eames, and more and more of Wayne’s Gotham.

There is one long, awful night when Arthur returns home but without any forewarning Eames stays out in the city. Arthur stays up to see the fresh, clean dawn, its light pallid and ineffective at banishing the nervousness that crawls across his skin. He sits in the low-slung armchair – a lumpy, uncomfortable futon he’s certain he half-remembers from an apartment of Eames’ – and watches it rise until his eyes ache.

The time for him to leave for work arrives, lingers, and passes, and Arthur doesn’t move from his chair. The hours of morning are collecting quietly towards early afternoon before Eames returns, and Arthur feels a relief so palpable it leaves a cool iron taste in his mouth; he’s on his feet in a heartbeat, and he has to hold himself by the window, perfectly still, to stop him either punching or kissing him.

Eames looks over with mild surprise. He appears unharmed, though the ever-present bags under his eyes are a little more pronounced, a little darker in the harsh light of the new day. “Tell me you didn’t wait up,” he says, tone lilted with amusement.

Arthur licks his lips, shifts his weight uneasily across his feet. “I didn’t – ” he begins, but cuts himself off, feeling foolish, incredibly aware of the heat rising into his face.

“Arthur,” Eames says softly. He crosses the room, places a hand on each of Arthur’s arms; they feel huge, and burning-hot. He’s sure they don’t usually feel so large. “You know I would tell you, if.” Arthur can’t meet his eye; can’t voice an agreement. He nods roughly, once; Eames’ fingers tighten ever so slightly. He kisses Arthur briefly, light and apologetic. “Shower, and go to work,” he says. “You have nothing to fear.”

Arthur detaches himself with a nod, and makes a beeline for their bathroom; he daren’t look back. Eames’ lies make his mouth feel dry and rough with fear; his tongue seems to grow large and leathery in his mouth, makes it hurt to swallow.

 

 

The morning of Eames’ departure plays host to a cold, crisp dawn. The night before it had seen nothing but a never-ending tumult of wind and rain lashing on the window; but the storm had broken with the new sun, and the apartment is eerily silent in its wake. Eames stands before him, not yet the huge, hulking think he will become, but taller, broader nonetheless. He still has Eames’ eyes, Eames’ smile.

The mask rests in a tin box trapped between Arthur’s palms, and he flips off the lid with a noisy click of the hinges. He lifts the bulky, cold mass out and holds it in his hands for a while, feeling the weight of it against his fingers; then Eames’ hand come to rest gently, slightly, on his wrists, and he guides Arthur’s up to his face. Together, they secure the mask.

Arthur lets out a shaky sigh; his empty hands fall. He wishes he’d kissed him, at least once more, but the mask hangs cruelly between them; there’s no chance of it now. It seems already to have latched onto his skin, welded in place, as if it has sat there for decades. Eames has become Bane right before his eyes, accumulated weeks and months of work all pooling down to this bearlike shadow of a man that stands before him. “Stay safe,” Arthur says, laying a fleeting touch on his arm.

Eames nods, and, with a final, quiet look, is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [mercuria's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mercuria/pseuds/mercuria) podfic of this chapter is now available [here](https://app.box.com/s/osy1xs461ucnzvca54x1)!

Two long, empty months pass in which he hears nothing from Eames at all. He goes each time to their planned rendez-vous; and each time he leaves with a nest of snakes coiling in his gut, fear seeping deep into his skin. One missed meeting he could account for; it’s often not easy to slip away under cover, Arthur knows that far too well. But two, two in a row, and Arthur can’t shake the uneasy fear that something is off, something is wrong.

The rumours begin to pool around the city; a monster of a man, an unstoppable figure, promising hope for all of those uncorrupted people who don’t languish at the top. A CIA plane goes down over the Atlas mountains; a leading scientist in nuclear physics is killed. It seems too meaningful, too systematic, too calculated to be haphazard, accidental. Arthur is left knowing they’ve let a monster on the loose, and hoping against hope that he’s still under Eames’ control.

 

 

According to the plan, he shouldn’t meet Katie for a good few weeks now; but Arthur’s not so sure that everything is still going _according to the plan_ , and so he ducks out of his silent, empty apartment one chilly night and sends a signal her way. He finds her the next day in a poky café, and she lets him tail her to the smoky backroom of a bar in Midtown where she curls up on the arm of a creaky sofa and passes him a lukewarm beer.

“You’re off-duty, officer,” she says with a humourless smile. “Relax.”

He accepts it from her, wishing quietly he had some means to chill the glass. He takes a long mouthful in silence and sets the bottle down with a thump on an unpleasantly sticky coffee table. “I’m concerned,” he confesses at last. “About Eames.”

When Katie looks across at him she’s utterly unsurprised. “I wondered how long you’d take to talk,” she deadpans, and then softens slightly when she catches the look in his eyes. “You think he’s gone native.”

He closes his eyes, lets out a tired sigh. “I don’t know what I think,” he admits. “I just wanted to – I don’t know. Let you know.”

She nods once. “Do you want to cut and run?”

Arthur shakes his head. “Stick with it,” he says. “If I need things to change – ”

“ – you’ll call.” She stands in a single, fluid motion; her eyes flick lazily around the darkening room. “I wouldn’t linger,” she says. “Some parts of Wayne’s mind don’t take too kindly to cops.”

He gives her a half hour’s headstart to clear this part of the city before he leaves the bar himself; he’s more concerned about her cover than his own wellbeing. He flags down a cab to speed his way down south, and he’s halfway home before he gets the call; a fresh body washed up in Gotham’s sewers. Not a kid this time, but an older man; dressed ruggedly in thick-soled boots and clothes too warm for summer. They pull him to the side, check his sodden clothes for identification, and when nothing arises Ross straightens up and calls the precinct for collection.

The sun is slanting low across the rooftops by the time the coroner’s car arrives; Arthur’s still pacing restlessly round the lip of the scene, jotting notes cursorily in his tiny pad. The light is playing havoc with the soft sway of the sewer’s waves, sending skittering beams arcing out in all directions, and for a moment – a heartbeat – when Arthur looks up into the gathering crowd he could swear he glimpses a familiar face; soft, female. But the light is playing tricks on him, and by the time he pushes through to the spot he’d thought she’d stood there’s no one there at all.

 

 

Dent Day passes with no immediate circumstance. A congressman goes missing, along with (Arthur presumes) the Wayne family pearls; he takes the opportunity for what it is, and John Blake meets Jim Gordon. Then Ross appears with a tiny tight line around his eyes and mouth, and Arthur’s standing at the gushing mouth of another cesspit of noise and stink, staring at an immobile form, and he can’t shake the chill that’s winding up and down his spine.

“You call it in,” Arthur says, stepping clear of the rushing, stagnant waters. “I know where he’s from.”

He had happened upon the orphanage much by chance. He’d thought Wayne would sympathise more strongly with an orphan; and truth be told it all sits rather close to the bone. He’s always found half-truths come to him more easily than lying outright. Hence the name, John Blake; a foundling’s name, though not the one he was found with, the one stamped beside his badge.

He’d appropriated St Swithin’s into the past he’d sketched for Blake, and hadn’t expected much to come of it; but once they had descended into Wayne’s mind he’d found himself drawn there, pulled along by an invisible hand, as if he was meant to be there. The projection named Reilly had needed only gentle coaxing before he fervently believed he’d known John Blake since the boy was four weeks old.

“Lot of guys been going down the tunnels when they age out,” Mark says. “Say you can live down there. Say there’s work down there.”

There it is, again; that creeping chill, up and down. Like tiny spiders, or rats’ claws. “What kind of work are you gonna find in the sewers?”

Mark shrugs. “More than you can find up here, I guess.”

The sewers, Arthur thinks, not for the first time. The sewers, again. There had been nothing about the sewers in their plan at all.

 

 

Then comes the time for John Blake to meet Bruce Wayne.

It’s rare that Arthur gets to meet a mark before they go under, and as of such he ends up with an odd impression of them, the best he can construct from afar. He’d expected many things of Bruce Wayne; intelligence; sadness; and his reputation tells of a penchant for tactlessness.

He hadn’t anticipated in the least what he’d found, trapped and alone and shaggy-haired in his antiquated, cold mansion. Though his city should have warned him otherwise, he hadn’t expected his quietness, his loneliness, or the extent of his despair.

He certainly hadn’t expected to like him.

Arthur travels home in silence, sits alone in his empty apartment and lets himself drown in the soft noises of the city, the hum and hush, the quiet wails, the thousands of non-existent people drifting by. He stares down at the space between his feet, his totem cupped in the palm of his hand, and pulls in deep, uneven breaths. _He’s the mark_ , he thinks. _He’s the mark, and you have Eames_.

He wishes he could say that it works.

 

 

His nerves aren’t banished by morning; they’re still shaken and jangling as he shrugs on his jacket and heads into Gotham for the new day. He tries to comfort himself with the numbing monotony of the beat, faced with little more mentally stimulating than overdue library fines, or a parking ticket, or some asshole with an enormous construction lorry that won’t move on no matter how much Arthur insists he has to.

He nearly misses Eames’ hit on the stock exchange entirely.

At first it makes him wary; it had been in no plan that Eames had told him, and the reasoning behind it isn’t instantly clear – but then he’s watching the Dark Knight swoop through Gotham’s streets with an odd, rushing hope inside his gut and his heart in his throat, chills weaving up and down his spine, and he understands.

He can breathe a little easier when he returns to his poky apartment that night, wishing his elderly neighbour a good evening and with a heavy bag of groceries burrowing red furrows into his hand. He’d thought, he’d thought – what exactly he’d thought isn’t clear, but the knowledge that the Dark Knight is once again on the move calms the frayed nerves disquieted by not much more than gut instinct. All according to plan, he thinks. Or at least more or less.

He never sleeps soundly in dreams, even when sedated into it. He lies awake and listens to the city breathing, and thinks of having Eames beside him again.

 

 

At the appointed time on the appointed day, Alfred Pennyworth comes to his door, looking haggard and worn and more than a little tearstained. Arthur silently beckons him in, and he takes a seat by the window, wringing and relaxing his hands. “That was the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he croaks quietly as Arthur hands him a cup of tea; he’s always found to some amusement that even within dream-space the drink has a tendency to soothe and relax.

“Hardest,” Arthur says quietly. “Not worst. I’m sorry you had to,” he adds, and though it’s a phrase he trots out with embarrassing regularity he finds this time that he means it. Alfred nods jerkily and takes the tea with trembling hands; he sips at it slowly, his eyes flittering shut. “You remember what comes next?” Arthur asks, eventually, keeps his tone level and calm.

Alfred nods again. “And I know that no matter what bullshit you’re about to come out with next, it is going to hurt.”

Arthur’s lips quirk in a small smile. “You bothered about where or how?”

Alfred shakes his head. They sit in silence as the old man drinks his tea, and by the time the cup is drained he looks a little more stable, a little less worn. Finally, he sets down his cup, closes his eyes, and says, “I’m ready,” and Arthur shoots him in the head.

 

 

The next time Blake meets Wayne, he’s a broken man.

Well, technically broken, at least. Truth be told, he looks more alive than Arthur’s ever seen him; he seems to burn with a deep, bright energy he hadn’t possessed before, when Arthur had stood facing a silent cripple in a faux-ancient, creaking manor. Now Wayne has lost Alfred, lost his money, lost his friends, and Eames has presumably only left him the house as a quiet reminder of his accumulated failure; but truth be told he looks far happier. As much as this prompts a small flicker of concern, Arthur can’t help but begrudgingly admire him for it.

Their meeting is, naturally, planned up to the second. Arthur even gives the warden a quiet nod towards ex-billionaire Bruce Wayne’s Lamborghini, and then has the guts to step up and quite innocently ask if he needs a ride.

They spend the journey mostly in comfortable silence. Arthur is gripped once again by the unwelcome sensation of friendliness; it’s beginning to become uncomfortable how much he actually likes him. “There are always people you care about,” Wayne says as they drive. His tone is solemn and forlorn, but there’s less of an air of misery about him, less of the overwhelming fog of despair. “You just don’t realize how much until they’re gone.” Arthur flexes his fingers against the wheel, keeps driving; but it throws him, more than he cares to admit.

He’s unsurprised to find himself dropping Wayne off in front of Selina Kyle’s apartment; the Batman’s interest has been piqued at last by the masked mercenary, and this is, after all, how they’d intended to lead him to Bane. As he climbs from the car, Arthur is suddenly gripped by the very real fear that this is the last time he’ll see Bruce Wayne; and the most worrying part of all is the sharpness with which he regrets it. “Don’t wait,” Wayne says, shutting the door and leaning back through the window. “I’ll get a cab.”

Arthur looks at him, one eyebrow raised. “You got money?”

Wayne falters, surprised; then his face is overcome by a sheepish smile. “Actually, no.”

He hands him a few bills, and Wayne is gone without a passing glance. His interest is engaged ahead of him now, and Arthur is firmly behind. He squashes the undesirable twist he feels inside his gut, a mixture of guilt and embarrassment and shame, and lets out a long, slow breath between his teeth. _He’s the mark, you moron_ , he reminds himself sharply, resisting the urge to rub his aching eyes. _He’s the mark, and you have Eames_. The radio squawks raucously beside him; he jumps a little, shakes his head, and with some difficulty breaks his attention away from Bruce Wayne.

 

 

As unexpected and as welcomed as his elevation to detective may be, it comes at the price of much later hours in the office and far less sleep; and the evening has already long dwindled away into night before he’s skipping down the steps at GPD and flicking on his cellphone to read the words _six missed calls_.

He punches the button, and Selina answers at the first ring. _“We’re on,”_ she says, quietly. He can hear the faint rattle of traintracks in the background; the _dedumdedum-skree_ of a metro train squealing still at a platform.

“He with you now?” Arthur asks, shoving his free hand in the pocket of his jeans, his stomach churning roughly.

 _“Not yet. Supposed to be here pretty soon, though.”_ She pauses for a moment; he can almost hear her thinking. _“Do you want me to tell you where they’ll be?”_

Arthur stands there in silence. He knows he should want to; he knows that if his worst fears are true, he needs to see Eames. He scours his face with his hand, lets out a shuddering sigh.

Truth be told, if he goes to watch the fight he honestly doesn’t know on whose side he’d fall.

“No,” he says, finally. “I don’t. If we have time, call me when it’s done.”

He gets no reply; she rings off without another word. He stands alone in the silent street and listens to the high hum of the dial tone until it seems to rattle his eardrums, move through his body in time with his pulse. He wonders at the guilt that twines like barbed wire around his gut, wonders why he can’t seem to shake the thought he’s done entirely the wrong thing.

 

 

He passes another silent, sleepless night, waiting for the end to come. The new dawn rises; the traffic begins its noisy roll. Their elderly neighbours begin another argument, and next door’s cat clatters noisily down the hallway outside, spooked at the sound.

Arthur stares into the city with a pressing numbness in his gut, and knows deep down that something has gone very wrong.

He’s taken aback to see Selina Kyle ducking into a cab in Midtown, and after a heartbeat’s hesitation fires an explanation as to his behaviour into the radio and follows after her. He’s even more surprised to see it wending its way down south, avoiding the city, heading for the airport; he can’t help but wonder how or where she thinks she’s going to run.

Truth be told, he’s more disturbed by the parts of Gotham he sees sliding nonchalantly sliding by, the fact that there’s an airport at all. He hasn’t designed any part of this, which means that he’s slowly meandering his way through Wayne’s raw subconscious, patted and moulded like wet clay to form the Gotham he knows, and letting a mark loose on your dreamspace – whilst sometimes unavoidable – is never a good idea.

GPD has called ahead; airport security is waiting for him, and he silently curses Jim Gordon’s famed efficiency. He had hoped to pull Katie aside and ask her what the hell she thinks she’s doing long before the cavalry came charging in, but no such luck. They’ve got her cuffed and pinned in a bright, spacious room when he arrives, and he’s reduced to speaking in riddles.

“What do you know about him?” Arthur asks.

Her eyes flick up to him. “That you should be as afraid of him as I am,” she says softly, and every single one of Arthur’s fears come true.

He manages to keep the need to crumple up small at bay until an olive-skinned policeman turns up with an even larger pair of cuffs and a miserable expression; then he’s collapsing by the cold, hard steel of a stinking toilet in a tiny airport bathroom stall, nausea roiling hot and fresh and pressing up against the inside of his mouth. He sits as still as he can until the trembling stops, until the dizzying fear has stopped clashing about his head, and then stands, washes his face in the lukewarm water from the chipped tin basin. He stares at himself in the mirror, twirls his totem roughly in his open hand.

“Did they kill him?” he had asked.

She’d turned to him with her huge brown eyes and he’d felt real bright fear inside him when she’d locked his gaze and said, softly, “I’m not sure.”

 

 

Gordon sends him chasing the Daggett leads, and as much as he’s certain it’ll come to nothing, that he’s nothing more than a phantom villain crafted by Wayne’s imagination, he’s equally certain that sitting at home or at the precinct won’t get him further in any direction. Besides, his only other option is the sewers; and he’s certain that if Eames is indeed still down there he doesn’t want to be found.

He allows himself to be led to the cement plant, as sceptical as he is of its usefulness. Then he’s spotting a face he knows he’s seen before, his hands are itching with the urge to pull his gun and he’s not allowed to believe in coincidences anymore.

The final act clicks neatly into place before him. His heart is hot and huge and pressing up inside his throat, his whole body gripped with fear. This isn’t Eames’ plan; this isn’t Eames’ hand.

This is Bane.

Arthur runs. Before he’s halfway to anywhere he’s thrown from his car by a clumsy hand, and he drags himself out into the smoking wreckage of the city and feels the bridges fall, one by one.

It occurs to him, then, quite how alone he has become; Katie, trapped in Blackgate; Wayne, taken far from anywhere he can reach; and Eames. He’s lost Eames entirely. In mindless desperation, he reaches back for the radio in the car. Even the few projections he might have rallied to his cause are pinned firmly underground –

“Not every cop,” he says aloud. He runs.

 

 

The television’s still broadcasting by the time he gets Gordon home, and he lets the words of Bane’s speech wash over him, miserable and numb. He knows Bruce Wayne has always had a sort of begrudging sentimentality for Jim Gordon; and if he knows this, Eames knows this. Bane knows this. Better he keeps him close in the hope of eking Wayne out of the woodwork than Bane’s mercenaries getting their hands on him and doing more damage to Wayne than they already have. Besides, as tenuous as it might be, he can rally half the projections in the city with Gordon’s face, and he knows quite certainly he is going to need every scrap of help he can get.

In short: what Gordon needs to do is run and hide, and at that Arthur has always been exceptional.

 _“Let me tell you the truth about Harvey Dent,”_ Bane says in a voice that jangles across Arthur’s nerves. He doesn’t know when precisely Eames developed that strange, haunting timbre, the jolting, unpredictable cadence, the coup de grâce of his entire performance; but he has to admit he saw the foundations laid.

He lets the clothes in his hands fall, turns his attention to the television instead, and as Bane lets the Commissioner’s words twine out into the world Jim Gordon’s head lowers slowly into his hands.

Arthur has to restrain his entire body against a shiver of fury, has to curl his hands into fists beside him to hold himself in check. He’s seen good people go down under the Dent Act, before Gotham became flagged as a no-go area for the people in their line of work; but he’s seen real assholes go down too, and he’s always accepted it as a tidy bit of lawmaking. A necessary evil.

And Jim Gordon. In a world he’s vehemently believed to free of heroes, Arthur’s violently ashamed of himself to learn he’s made Gordon into one.

His hands are still shaking when he picks up the clothes from the floor where they’d fallen and crumpled up small. He smoothes out the creases with a trembling hand, sucks in a short breath between his teeth, closes his eyes. Too much. All too much. The roaring sounds of Blackgate bursting open floods tinnily into the small room; at least, he thinks absently, there’s a chance he can find Katie again.

The picture on the television judders slightly, and the speakers let out a long, high screech. The screen snaps abruptly to black.

 

 

The city is eerily silent. Arthur treads noiselessly down vast, empty streets, the tarmac hard and cold beneath his feet, his ears buzzing gently in the unnaturally silent aftermath of the raucous din. The air tastes rancid, baked. He passes an upturned stroller, devoid of baby; a battered shopping-cart, spewing hosiery and unopened tins of catfood out across the sidewalk.

Arthur reaches a crossroads, takes the first left. Four houses down he ducks through the small, red front door and, after a moment’s pause, shuts it behind him.

The house is as silent as the street beyond, but it’s interrupted by the soft, quiet noises of indoors; the scuffle of water through pipes; the arrhythmic click of the heating; the creak of an upstairs window, jammed open despite the cold. He stands still in the hall for a handful of heartbeats, listening hard. Finally, he hears what he’s searching for; the almost-noiseless padding of bare feet on carpet, coming from above.

He takes the stairs slowly, one hand on his gun, but he can see Katie the moment he reaches the landing; she’s leaning on the frame of the bedroom door, waiting for him. He allows himself to relax, slides his gun back into its holster, and he sees a tiny shift in her face as the tension floods out from within it. She turns back into the room and he follows her unquestioningly.

They take a moment to survey one another. Arthur thinks she looks angry and hard and terrified and vulnerable all at once, and this time it isn’t the Forger in her come out to play. She doesn’t look hurt, though; and for that he’s grateful. He sinks heavily into an overstuffed sedan chair; presumably once some great family heirloom. The canvas is ripped and ragged, and the stuffing spills its guts out onto the floor beside his feet.

“You don’t have a plan,” she realises, and her voice seems muffled somehow by the frayed air around them. “The only reason I haven’t blown my brains out is because I assumed you have a plan.”

“No,” Arthur says after a pause, with a humourless smile and a shake of the head. “No plan.”

She nods once; her lips tighten. She looks very young. “Do you want me to stay?” she asks softly, and Arthur knows she doesn’t mean in this house, or with him, but in Wayne’s mind altogether. He thinks of all the horror they’ve seen, all the horror Wayne’s mind – Bane – has done, and his throat clogs. He can’t answer.

“I can’t leave him,” he says, and it comes out more hoarse and desperate than he’d intended. He wants to say _I don’t know what to do_ , but he knows the admission will all but kill him. He thinks she probably suspects as much anyway.

She nods again, and, after a short silence, says, “I’ll stay.”


	3. Chapter 3

Winter has come to Gotham, settling onto the city in a silent shroud.

The projections are growing restless. They can taste they have an intruder amongst them, but they seem convinced as to Bane’s authenticity; their anger is thus laced with confusion, and with each passing day it escalates. Arthur has been jostled in the streets several times now, and once or twice he’s even been chased, but not far. He knows full well his cover won’t last long.

He crouches down beside a car, can in hand, and he feels the icy ground soak cool water up into his knees, feels his bones stiffen against the cold. He doesn’t have the time to stop and check, here, out in the open, utterly exposed, but as the acrid smell of the gas hits his nose and fear makes his heart thump painfully hard in his chest he’s thinking quietly to himself _not real, not real, not real_.

He’s taking the fuel to St Swithin’s. It’s an unnecessary risk, save for the strength it gives his cover and the iota of comfort it affords him to do something good in the midst of this Pandemonium. It’s all about the little things, Cobb used to say; and when Arthur feels lost in the midst of an avalanche he’s not about to begrudge himself the little things.

The atmosphere there is subdued today, but they’re managing to get something to eat and the gas will give them a little fuel for a fire. He sometimes believes he can judge the state of Wayne’s mind by the mood of the boys, but he has no way of knowing whether this is in any way true. The home has taken refuge for all sorts of people these days; the corners are stuffed with the lumpy, crumpled forms of people of all kinds and ages, and they shoot him tired, suspicious glances as he ducks in through the door, clutching his tiny prize to his chest and making a beeline for Father Reilly. He eyes the gaunt faces with suspicion; he’s seen what the people of this city can do from hunger. Arthur doesn’t breathe easily until he’s handed it over, and he’s on his way out when he passes a cluster of small, huddling figures whose conversation makes him pause.

“They say his name is Bane,” one boy says, younger, slim like all of them, with shockingly pale blue eyes. Though the boys had glanced at Arthur with some suspicion when he arrived they now ignore him entirely, more interested in the conversation they’d already begun on his arrival. “That his veins don’t have blood in them – they’re full of poison. That’s why he wears the mask. Keeps him alive.”

This is met by a general negative consensus, a cacophony of snorts and jeers. The boy casts around a cool look, still certain of his convictions. “I heard he isn’t human,” says a second, dark-skinned, tone a little braver. “That if he breathes any oxygen he’ll drop down dead like that.” He snaps his fingers.

Most of the boys still appear unsatisfied by this explanation; though some of the younger ones have quietened. Arthur supposes there must be some comfort in believing Bane’s actions to be alien in nature, beyond human design. “No, he’s human all right,” says a third; a boy he doesn’t recognise, even slighter than the others, almost gaunt. “Two arms, two legs. And his eyes,” he adds, in a quiet afterthought; “he has human eyes.” Something in this last remark cuts Arthur to the bone.

 

 

His visits to Katie are a little less routine and a lot less charitable; he thinks she’d probably be insulted if he started turning up with rations, and besides, it would shoot both their covers to hell if he did. It’s dangerous enough for him to be seen associating with her at all. As Reilly said, cops are being hunted on the streets these days like dogs; but a few weeks have passed since he last caught sight of her, and he decides, as he’s passing, to call in.

He knows she’s squatting in a plush old townhouse in Uptown, probably the pride of four generations of American citizens up above. Down here, the door is ripped from its hinges, and the soft, well-groomed carpet is ragged and torn at the edges, coming away at the wall. The hall stinks of urine and beer, and when he hears the soft sound of voices above he forgoes sweeping the ground floor to climb the stairs instead.

“This is what you wanted,” he hears, a younger voice than Katie’s. More cheerful by half.

“No,” Katie replies, softly. “It’s what I thought I wanted.”

The air trembles gently with the rolling hum of one of Bane’s cars drifting by as Arthur turns onto the landing. He wonders if there’s any of their resistance lurking nearby, trying to track its movement; but even if there were they might not know his face, or he theirs, and approaching a suspicious-looking individual lurking on a street corner is a sure-fire way to get himself killed either by enemy or friendly fire.

He knocks once on the doorframe; the young girl turns, pressed up small against Katie’s back, and throws him a deeply hateful look. Jen, he thinks, but they’ve never been introduced. She probably thinks he’s competition, he decides. That, or it’s just the general hostility all projections seem to show him these days. She turns to Katie, asks a silent question; Katie meets her eye, nods her towards the door. She shoots Arthur another, even more vitriolic glare and pushes him aside, slamming the door.

Katie turns from the window, gives him a wry smile. “Sorry,” she says. “She’s a little mean-tempered sometimes.”

He shrugs once to show he’s taken no offence, and joins her at the window, surveying the silent scene. The city is so quiet, nowadays; amplified by the coming of winter but in no way caused by it. “You know she isn’t real,” he says, one eyebrow raised.

“Of course.” Her mouth curves slightly; on anyone else it could be called a smile. “I like the company.” She slides him an appraising look. “You doing okay?”

He shrugs again in reply; he knows he couldn’t voice how he is, even if he wanted to. “You?”

She nods. “Enough to eat, keeping warm. Not attracting any attention – not yet, anyway.”

As ever comes the unasked question: how much longer? Their lives are lived under the constraints of a time-bomb; the time until the projections turn on them; the time until Wayne dies, or wakes, or both; the time until the kick. All deadlines hurtling up fast. “I’m working on it,” Arthur replies, and he knows she’ll see the lie in it; he’s not had any luck in months now. Mostly, he’s living with the fear that this has become a problem he can’t fix. He’s been worried about the bleeding effect since before day one; and his fears have been realised, more acutely and more horribly than he could have ever imagined.

If he were to kill Bane, if Bane were to die before Arthur could get to him – Arthur has no guarantee whether it’ll be Eames or Bane who wakes up again. His fear, and his instinct, drive him to believe the latter.

He doesn’t know how much of this Katie knows. He suspects she has an inkling, or possibly even more; he knew she was smart when he hired her. She hasn’t seen sense to leave, despite the veritable hell they find themselves living in; and from this he takes that she trusts him, though he’s uncertain why. She might have a plan of her own for all he knows.

He loiters on the other side of the doorway as he leaves, just in case someone was watching through the window, and then steps alone into the fresh-falling snow. It hits with an unwelcome briskness the moment he steps out, and he shrugs up his jacket, turns up his coat-collar against the few flakes that slither unpleasantly down his neck; it’s not quite thick enough to crunch underfoot, and as of such the going is slow, the pavement littered by muck and slush. In the earliest days, the roads had been strewn with unwanted loot, thousands of broken heirlooms scattered piecemeal across the floor; but since the winter came, everything has been long since scavenged for firewood. Even the most decrepit of heirlooms can be made to burn.

Arthur cuts past City Hall on his way home. It’s hardly out of the eye of the enemy, but although he’s a cop he’s a relatively unknown one; out of uniform, he’s just another solitary figure wending his way through the liberated city. He trusts his fast pace and sharp look of intent to keep others at bay, and generally it gets him through, though the recent days have been worse than those before them.

He pauses at the lip of the sidewalk to let a convoy of Bane’s vehicles grumble by, and as he ducks his head to avoid the drivers’ gaze he picks out something bright against the virgin snow. He waits for the final truck to crawl its way along the street and out of sight before he steps out onto the road, heading towards the small splash of red against the white, the snow around him already stained and foxed to a light muddy brown by the perpetual muck of the city.

He knows what it is long before he scoops it into the palm of his hand. The crimson poker chip rests in the curve of his tattered glove, and his heart is aching and torn.

 

 

Though the majority of his projections are angry and confused, parts of Wayne’s mind have united against Bane’s threat with the clinical precision Arthur supposes they’ve inherited in kind from lymphocytes. He sticks closely with this group, firstly because it is led by Jim Gordon and thus defends his cover, and secondly because they, out of everyone, are most likely to afford him success in reaching Bane. They had tried early on to send in infiltrators to Bane’s group; but after the fourth man’s head was unceremoniously returned to them in the river they abandoned any hope of direct trickery.

It is through this group that he finds Miranda Tate.

She’d been hiding with Fox up in a bank near Katie’s beautiful townhouse, slumming it on a makeshift cot in the offices above. He’d been scouting for vantage points nearby, hoping to keep an eye on Katie and establish a new meeting-place as much as help defend a new area of Gotham against Bane, and when he’d been sweeping silently through the offices he’d heard scuffling, which could be rats, and soft muttering, which most definitely was not.

He finds her curled up in the corner of an icy, ravaged room, nursing a small fire with a heavy metal prong, and Arthur’s heart swells up in his chest, feels fit to burst with relief at seeing a friendly face long before he registers any fear as to what might have happened up above to cause Mal to come down below. Most of the afternoon passes before he has the chance to get her on her own, with Fox stuck like a leech and various members of Gordon’s resistance insisting on making themselves known to her; he spends it hanging nervously at her side, his anxiousness to speak to her itching away under his skin.

He waits til she looks tired and uncomfortable and then offers to escort her to a restroom, and once they’re smuggled away down a long corridor he grabs her arm and hugs her quick and hard.

He’s rewarded only by the cool press of a knife up against his ribs. “Touch me again,” she says, her tone as cool as steel, “and I will stab you and scream.”

He lets her go slowly, holds his hands above his head, backs away. She looks alien and feral in the flickering light, her lips tugged back across her canines in a snarl, her eyes dark and hard as flint. “Sorry,” he says quietly, his voice hoarse. “I mistook you for a friend.”

He leaves her alone in the frozen corridor, his each step rapping harshly on the concrete floor. He ignores the inquisitive glances cast his way and steers himself through the high-vaulted, marble-clad bank, frees himself from the recesses of stuffy, half-eaten air until he’s feeling sharp, bright air against his skin, sucking in burning lungfuls of it as hard and fast as he can, fumbling with his totem desperately in his hand.

A projection, he decides, once the blood in his ears has calmed down a little from a heady roar. Dragged in from either his mind, or Eames’, and given his reception Eames seems a more likely candidate than him; or Bane, really, seeing as Eames no longer seems to be in possession of his mind. Her purpose here escapes him entirely, and though he considers it far from likely she’s truly here as a friend to them he has no proof; any truth he told would seem completely mad, and with no evidence Gordon wouldn’t allow him to tell it anyhow. They’re both fully aware how toxic treachery and sedition can be in an environment such as this.

She’s been warped and twisted and clawed into some cruel facsimile of the woman he knows; Eames is far further gone than Arthur has ever thought. He stands and shivers in the clawing, bitter cold until the tips of his fingers go numb and his eyes ache and burn. He feels utterly alone.

 

 

They take Captain Jones on a tour of the city, and Arthur spends the excursion nervous and wary, anticipating an interruption by Bane; but nothing comes. They’re being too open, he knows, too obvious. There’s no way that nobody has spotted them. He wonders if Gordon suspects the same as well, whether this is all some new elaborate scheme to test their forces or Bane’s, but there’s no way he can know for certain. He keeps alert, keeps his sentences abrupt, keeps his eyes locked on the door.

Tate breaks the news to Jones about the bomb. He’d been there when she’d first told Gordon, her eyes sorrowful and repentant but the emotions looking alien and unnatural on her face; but he was uncertain as to whether his memory of Mal was warping her words, or whether she was truly lying through her teeth.

His caution is rewarded in full when the bank’s foyer explodes in a raucous clatter of rubble, and he dives to the floor, shoving Tate in Fox’s direction in the hope they might get out. He plasters himself to the floor, tries to eke forwards towards the rail and judge whether they have a chance of escape, and he feels himself go numb as he sees Bane beneath him, the hard-soft curve of his scalp, shining in the dimmed light.

Bane kills Jones. In a sense, Arthur is indifferent; Jones was nothing but a projection, after all; but watching Bane so dispassionately execute someone he had believed human births a flurry of rats in his stomach.

“There were people living upstairs,” a man at Bane’s side says, his accent clipped and British. Bane looks up, his eyes merciless and pitch-black, and Arthur flinches back, hides himself from view; Bane’s gaze drifts idly on, disinterested. Arthur’s torn between cursing his cowardice and willing quiet the thunder of his heartbeat inside his chest.

“Give them over for judgement,” Bane replies. He gestures at the bodies of Jones and his friends. “Hang them where the world will see.”

In the corner of his eye, he sees Fox and Tate making their way for the elevator. He knows he should join them, try and keep the old man safe; he’s what they need to disable the bomb, after all. But it’s too late to stop them descending, and he knows the elevator shafts will most likely take them straight to the hands of Bane. With a wrenching effort of will Arthur pushes himself off the cold marble floor and ducks into the nearest office in a single, silent movement, just as the clatter of boots hits the bottom step of the stairs below.

He strips out the contents of a cupboard haphazardly, throws them down across the already paper-strewn floor, and ducks inside, tries to listen hard over the judder of his pulse in his hears and his throat. A few minutes pass; nothing. He hears more feet on the stairs, this time headed not up, but down. He counts to a thousand and then pushes open the door, comes to stand in the abandoned hallway.

There’s no sign of Fox, of Tate, or of Bane. The room is empty, save for the soft clouds of dust which still meander slowly down around him in gentle but tumultuous waves. He finds himself shaking, his whole body trembling with fear, a hot, thick, gut-soaking punch; it lingers like a copper-sharp tang at the back of his throat, bright and fresh, raw and somehow sore. Try as he might he can’t stop himself shivering, his breath coming in quick, shaky, erratic bursts, his heartbeat a thick, low _thoom_ in his ears.

He remembers the warm, steady rush of Eames’ pulse against his fingertips; fingers carding through his hair in a Florentine hotel. He stares down at the space where Bane had stood, remembers the sharpness of his stance, the cold echo of his voice, and the difference chokes him, grabs something tight in his chest, alien and wrong. He had known, he supposes, that Eames was gone; but he hadn’t believed; had thought, had hoped. After having seen Bane stood beneath him, wholly and incontrovertibly a different man, the knowledge feels gnarled tightly around his bones.

 

 

It guts him. He doesn’t even realise how much until Gordon’s pulling him aside with a kindly smile and dropping him down in front of a stack of duty rosters, putting him in charge of scavenging expeditions, anything and everything to keep his mind busy; he’s spent so long believing himself to be stoic and steadfast and indomitable that he misses the point where the ground begins to crumble beneath his feet.

There’s a stranger’s face haunting him, looming up in every mirror and window he passes. Old, tired, worn; his face, but the gaunt eyes of an older man. He feels small and cold.

They have days left before the bomb detonates. Months that have trickled into weeks and now days, and surely Arthur should have saved the world by now.

 

 

They slam headfirst into that final deadline: tomorrow. The bomb detonates tomorrow. Arthur hasn’t had a plan in months, and after tomorrow he’ll have no chance to make one at all.

Gordon is gathering a force; what he intends to accomplish has passed Arthur by. A last stand, he supposes. Some inane theory as to how he’ll dodge past Bane’s impassable defences, dismantle the indestructible bomb and free Gotham from the tyranny of liberty, no doubt. Months ago, it would have excited him, given him hope; but he’s weary of hope, now. He has very little of it left.

Gordon’s stooped over a table when Arthur walks in with a small pack of cops at his heels. There are so few of them left now; as the days drifted by, a handful at a time would head out the door on patrol and not come back. Nobody had the stomach to chase them down, and Arthur couldn’t begrudge them their own free will when he has no choice of his own. Gordon’s eyes light up when Arthur enters the room; he looks weather-worn and tired, but not desolate, not yet. Arthur can see his mouth moving, counting them in, sees the disappointment assemble on his face.

“That’s it?” Gordon says, his voice low, scanning the faces again. Arthur says nothing; stares blankly back. “Foley,” he realises, frowning, “where’s Foley, damn it?”, and he’s out the door quicker than Arthur can stop him, blurting an ineffectual warning in his wake. He turns back to the quiet cluster of men in the room, huffs out a small sigh when he realises he doesn’t know any of them by name.

“I’ll follow him,” he tells them, resigned. “Stay put.”

Gordon’s out of sight by the time he hits the street; but Arthur knows where he’s going. He takes a shortcut he knows through the shadier part of town, too close to the Narrows for most cops’ liking, and though he’s used it countless times before he still finds himself nervous and edgy as he ducks down alleyways and sidestreets, his lonely footsteps echoing harshly on the cracked and aged stones. The alleyway he’s cut down is shrinking slowly on either side as he walks; the buildings loom darkly above him, windows and doors indistinguishable in the dim light. “I hear you’re looking for men, Mr. Blake,” comes a voice from behind him, and he flinches before he can help it; feels his fingers twitch towards his gun.

He turns slowly, keeping his hands low, and takes in the familiar face of Miranda Tate, feels a familiar, twisting ache run him through. “I thought under the circumstances I might do,” she adds, and saunters a little closer to him, and though her smile is all innocence and sweetness he can’t help but think it looks somehow cruel on her face. He notes the noisy _clik_ of her heels on the pavement; he’d heard no such sound before she’d spoken. “The Commissioner?”

Arthur nods, gestures towards the end of the street. “I’ll take you to him.”

They walk quickly through the city, their travel swallowed in its inexorable silence. If Arthur were a better man, a stronger man, he’d turn on Tate now he has her alone; he’d do what he had to, find out who she truly is, what she is to Bane. But Arthur is no longer a better man, no matter who he’d been when he’d first descended into Gotham; the city has warped him, made him small and cruel and alone.

He catches Jim Gordon just as he finishes his row with Foley, the silence of the city cruelly torn by the noise of their argument. It feels good, Arthur realises, to hear the air a little shaken from its silence; the city feels a little less drowned, a little more alive. Gordon nods for the two of them to join him, and they set off back into the city together, an unlikely trio striking small, lonely figures against the barren skyline.

 

 

Dawn breaks in a hushed veil of grey light. Gordon and his men were on the move hours before, tracking Bane’s trucks all throughout the city; Arthur himself has taken the high point on the fire escape after a quiet confession at being a dab hand with a rifle, and thus he stands alert, scanning the ground and the sky, his heart in his throat for fear of Bane sweeping out of nowhere to stand triumphant at Gordon’s side.

On the edge of his vision he catches a flash of grey-black steel; the grille beneath his feet chuckles gently with the rattle of the approaching truck. “Heads up,” he murmurs into the radio, and watches in tense silence as the small figures of Gordon and his men waltz around it. He keeps still, keeps his eye on the horizon, tries to keep himself calm in spite of his fear.

Arthur can see the relief that runs across Gordon’s face from here; he doesn’t need to glance into his scope to read the words “got it” falling from his mouth. He lets loose a little sigh of relief, and slings up his gun, makes ready to move out –

– and watches in horror as, from nowhere, the street floods with Bane’s men.

Arthur holds himself perfectly still, his pulse pounding hotly in his throat; but the men on the ground don’t so much as glance his way. The Commissioner and his men leave without a sound.

Arthur is yet again on his own.

For a horrible, gut-wrenching moment panic engulfs him, and he has no idea what to do, can’t hear or breathe over the noise of his heartbeat, the crashing roar of his breathing – then he’s forcing himself back to calm, dragging in a deep, cool breath between his teeth, jamming his nails into his palms and closing his eyes to _think_.

The cops, he decides, trapped under the city. They’ve had enough firepower to break a few of them out for a while, but had feared setting off the bomb; there’s little he can do to prevent that eventuality now, and if he’s to try and take on Bane he’s going to need help, if only just cannon fodder whilst he dodges along the sidelines. He had a partner, a long time ago, a man by the name of Ross – one of the many stuck in the sewers below. He thinks he knows where he can find him.

He packs up the rifle in slow, methodical movements, and despite the fact he has his mind resolved on something he can’t shake the slight tremble in his hands. Pain is in the mind, he reminds himself. Pain, and anger, and fear, and despair.

 

 

The night drifts gently, silently down, unhurried by either Arthur’s anxiety or the events of the day to come. He has spent the afternoon alone in their underground H.Q., consulting their ramshackle maps of the sewer system, and he’s pinned down what he reckons to be the easiest point of exit, dropped a message down to Ross as subtly as he could. Now he stands by the pre-appointed manhole, his eye on the two mercenaries lurking one at either side of it, and waits, his heartbeat thundering thickly against the darkness.

A quick, silent flash of light from the grate beside his foot: one-two, one-two. Arthur nods to no one, braces himself in a quick, deep breath and steps out into the night. He takes down the first mercenary with a swing of his arm and ducks down to the manhole cover by his foot, already shuddering slightly with Ross’ attempts to shift it; he tugs it aside with one huge heave, feels pain lance through his bones, his shoulders and elbows juddering slightly in their sockets. The second mercenary turns, alerted at the noise, and Arthur dodges aside to put him down just as Ross begins to struggle his way through.

Arthur extends an arm down to Ross, grabs at his hand; Ross smiles and nods as he comes up, and Arthur is a heartbeat from echoing it when the bullet arcs from nowhere and slams into Ross, throwing him lifeless to the ground.

Arthur’s blood runs icily cold. In the eerie, flickering light he sees a fresh bout of mercenaries crawling like ants around the outflow pipe. One detaches from the rest, drops a bomb squarely down the open manhole, and Arthur can’t hold back a flinch as it goes off with a low boom beneath him, rattling his kneecaps.

The guy steps forward, shoves him with a quick, hard jab to the chest, and he plummets gracelessly down the face of the blocked tunnel below, punching the breath from him with every roll. He lands hard, spitting snow, but even as he hauls himself away there’s a hand in his hood jerking him unforgivingly from the floor; then he falls down once more, the cold of the concrete is clawing up through his knees as he raises his hands, the inescapable barrel of a gun pointed firmly towards his head. He is completely outnumbered.

Fear punches through his bones, hot and desperate, and he’s unable to stop himself from shaking, unable to catch the quick, hissing breaths that escape from his mouth. He knows in his gut, in his bones, there is no one left to come for him: he hasn’t seen Katie in months; Gordon is surely executed by now; Wayne is lying half-dead somewhere, imprisoned by Bane –

– and Eames. Eames is long since gone, and now Arthur has failed him he will die down here alone and live again as Bane, up above, in reality. Arthur will never see him again. 

Arthur thinks of Eames’ smile, bright and warm in the setting Italian sun. He pulls in a shocked, shaking breath, closes his eyes, and waits.

He’s jolted suddenly at a quick, sudden noise; not the crack of a gunshot, but a quiet, muffled thud, not dissimilar to a body hitting tarmac at speed; then the rough jolting _thwack!_ of fists on flesh. He flicks open his eyes in a flash and sees – _the Batman_ , his cape billowing darkly out behind him, and hope bursts up in Arthur’s chest, floods every limb. It’s –

Improbable, he hears Eames say, years ago. But not impossible. Arthur jumps to his feet, takes down the guard at his side, bites down on a maniacal laugh. “You missed a spot.”

Adrenaline is still clashing violently around his veins; he can’t quite stop the tremble of his hand. He takes in Bruce Wayne with hungry eyes, each tiny tick and flaw Arthur knows so well, and he’s almost reluctant to believe he stands before him, that he hasn’t fallen in the midst of all this into some crazed dream of his own.

Arthur’s desperate to ask where he went, what Bane did to him; but he knows there’s no time for it now, and Arthur’s not sure he would even answer if he asked. If he had thought Wayne transformed before it is nothing to how he is now; stronger, certainly, but angrier, so much so, running through his very veins, lashed to his bones in a tightly-wound coil. Dangerous, he thinks, but only if used in the wrong way, used by the wrong hand – and it hits him then in a quick, hard punch that Wayne might actually win. He feels his gut clench, nerves clanging with excitement; they had thought to dissuade Wayne from his life as Batman through punishment and pain – but catharsis, and retribution, and a sense of having the job done – might, _might_ just do the same.

Wayne reels out the big guns, and heartbeats later the cops he’d gathered on the other side of the manhole are swarming up through the ramp, pelting past them in droves. Wayne is determined to continue without him; that he should get “those he cares about” out over the bridge, leave Wayne to go against Bane alone. Wayne looks at him when he says it, watches Arthur with an odd kind of intensity that makes his stomach flip. In another life, he thinks, and something sharp punches through him, something hard and bitter.

Silence falls between them; the air is jagged and cold. Arthur knows, with absolute certainty, that this truly is the last time he’ll see Bruce Wayne. “Thanks,” he says, and the words half-stick in his throat; not from reluctance to say them, but more regret at how little they mean in the aftermath of everything Wayne has done for him.

Wayne stays motionless before him, impassive through the mask. “Don’t thank me yet.”

Arthur half-shrugs, stares him down. “I might not get a chance later.”

Wayne nods once, and Arthur turns and walks silently away. He pauses once he gets to higher ground, glances back down towards the outlet pipe; there’s nothing there but darkness, the swarming mass of the cops bubbling back out into the city. He looks out across the silent skyline instead, sees for the first time the giant shape of the bat emblazoned across the bridge before him, wings alight, and pure, bright, unfamiliar hope soars through his bones.

 

 

He wanders aimlessly for a while, reluctant to go back to the echoing, empty bunker for an uneasy night’s sleep. The city is all but deserted; the ersatz light of the bat has chased many from the streets, and especially those who would fear meeting a tall dark stranger on a night like this. Save for the odd, shrouded silhouette lurking menacingly on the more dangerous corners he sees no one, is left entirely to his own thoughts.

With no mind given to his direction, he finds his feet take him to Katie. She’d been chased out of her plush townhouse a few months back by one of the more persistent and virulent of the mobs. He has no idea what happened to Jen, and he daren’t ask. Few live alone, these days, even the most antisocial or wary preferring strength of numbers to finding refuge in isolation; but Katie is amongst the exceptions. Instead of ducking inside the brightly-lit church hall, even at this hour alive with the soft sound of singing, he crosses the street and enters a decrepit apartment block through the half-rotten, ineffectual door.

He takes his time going round the chilly concrete rooms, but the block is empty. He spends a moment staring at the flaming bat-signal outside; it’s all but burnt out by now, sputtering soft, golden flames onto the frozen water below. He sweeps the corners one last time and ducks back down the stairs onto the street below.

He can taste the rapidly approaching dawn, creeping thinly through the air; it hits him quite sharply how little time they have left. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and sets off at a faster pace towards St Swithin’s, starts half-jogging down the street and throwing only cursive glances into the dying shadows at either side – but when he reaches the end of the road he pauses; there’s an alien sound rending the air, a long, low rumble, something he once knew but hasn’t heard for many months now. He turns to look behind him and nearly jumps out of his skin to see Katie sat there, grinning a Cheshire-cat smile and straddled across the vast, black shell of the Bat-Pod.

“Going my way?” she deadpans, and Arthur can’t help but crack a smile.

“I’m not even going to ask,” he says wryly, and steps off the sidewalk towards her. “You’ve seen him too?”

She nods once. “Could hardly believe it.” She pauses, looks a little anxious; “I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t – ” He shakes his head, cuts her off, and she nods again, relieved. “I’m supposed to be opening up the mid-town tunnel,” she continues, “but...”

She trails off, shoots him an anxious look. “The bridge, for me,” he says, eyes on the ground.

He draws in a deep sigh, pushes it out slowly, rubs some of the tiredness out of his eyes. “Arthur,” she says, quietly.

He glances at her briefly, looks away. “Yeah,” he murmurs wearily. He closes his eyes, calms his mind, and then; “Wayne,” he decides, though his tongue feels lumpen and dry in his mouth as he says it. “We back Wayne.”

He half-catches the look of pity in Katie’s eyes; then she carefully assembles her face to something more neutral, nods more confidently than he’s sure she feels. The machine under her lets out a great, rattling _vroom_ ; her eyes focus on the brightening horizon. “Sure you don’t want that ride?”

He smiles a little, though he knows it won’t reach his eyes. “I wouldn’t know where to put my hands.”

She grins at him; then her expression falters, and she casts him a quiet look. “Good luck.”

He nods. “And you.”

Arthur watches her pull away with a rumbling roar, and the weight of his decision settles down on his bones, coats his insides with lead. He sets off again in the direction of St Swithin’s. Above him, cold, grey light peels open the thick, black sky, and dawn breaks across the last day of Gotham.

 

 

Arthur watches Bruce Wayne fly the cumbersome bomb out over the bay, and the moment the craft enters his line of sight he knows. He keeps his eyes glued as it arcs out across the bright horizon, sees no warning flash, no ejected pilot; nothing but a bright, silent cloud, drifting up and out in pure silence. The air around him ripples, displaced by the far-off explosion, but that is all; he imagines the fire, imagines the heat and the pain, imagines his bones crumbling to ash.

He takes out his badge, throws it away. The pretence is no longer necessary. He ignores the bright, happy faces of the Father and the boys and begins the journey back to Gotham alone.

 

 

Arthur has no clue how much time Yusuf’s concoction has bought him; he just keeps walking. He finds he has time enough to reach City Hall, and when he arrives the place is mostly deserted save for the scattered bodies of the fallen. The clogged air hangs around him, thick and heady with the familiar smell of death; it swirls in miniscule, tumultuous hurricanes around him as he walks but otherwise lies deadened and still.

He crosses the huge marble foyer, winding past piles of shattered stone and clumps of broken bodies. A few rescue teams send curious glances his way, but none bother him. He ducks through into the main room through a cloud of dust, and when it clears he finds Jim Gordon standing there, pale and shaken but alive. “Bane?” Arthur asks. Gordon’s eyes clear a little; he nods through to the back of the room.

The figure slumped against the far wall is impossibly small. It sits crumpled in on itself, its torso sagging wearily down towards the floor; even from a distance Arthur can tell he’s barely breathing. He crosses the space in silence, each step he takes pushing a cold numbness through every vein. He squats down in front of him; wearily, Bane lifts his head, and his eyes clear a little to rest on Arthur’s face. Arthur looks down at his chest, at the wound in his gut, and he knows straight away it’s fatal.

“I know you,” Bane says, his voice a dry, rattling creak. Arthur glances up, finds those cold, bright eyes fixed clearly on him. “I know your name.”

Arthur sits down beside him, something like hope twining softly through him. “Do you remember it?” Bane doesn’t answer; his head moves slightly, eyes fluttering restlessly around the room, searching for something he can’t find. “I knew you,” Arthur continues, fighting to keep his voice steady. “A long time ago.”

“No one cared who I was,” Bane murmurs hoarsely, his eyes tired and his mind far away. His head droops a little towards his chest; he tries to continue speaking, but the effort exhausts him, his breath coming even more shallowly than before. Arthur feels a shiver run through him, tries to hold his body in check.

“Do you remember your name?” he asks, but he can feel Bane’s mind unhitching, see his eyes greying, hear the way his breathing is catching roughly in his throat, and Arthur feels the panic set in, hot and desperate. He reaches down into his pocket, scoops his totem out into his hand; Eames’ sits beside it, as it has since Arthur found it lost in the snow all those months ago. He’s always known this moment would come.

He takes it between thumb and finger, and with his free hand he lifts the cold, deadened weight of Bane’s arm, lets the small red chip fall into Bane’s palm. Bane’s fading gaze drops down to it, and his great, smooth brow wrinkles a little in a frown; his eyes flick back up to Arthur’s face, wary, uncertain. “Do you know what this is?” Arthur asks, his voice cracking, ripping at the seams. “Do you know who I am?”

Bane’s eyes fall back down to his palm, and he stays frozen for so long Arthur’s almost certain he’s lost him; then they rise back up to his face, and where they had been cold and empty and cruel they are now soft and kindly and warm. “Arthur,” Eames says, softly.

Arthur feels a bright, warm smile cleave across his face, so fierce and sharp his cheeks ache with it. “Hey,” he murmurs in reply, and his voice shakes in his throat, relief slamming into him, hot, bright tears pressing sharply against the backs of his eyes. It’s over, he thinks. It’s done. He closes them briefly to force them back, and when he opens them once more Eames is still.

 

 

Arthur goes home. There’s almost no part of Gotham that was saved from Bane’s siege, and his apartment block is no exception; the ground-floor door is ripped clean off its hinges and lies to one side, quietly rotting from exposure to rain and snow. The whole of the ground floor has been trashed, the paint torn from the walls, the filthy carpet curling underfoot, the hot smell of trash and effluence plastered through the air, but Arthur’s apartment is on the fourth and with every flight of stairs he takes the damage is less pervasive.

His own door is still locked. He’s long since lost the key, but he jimmies the lock with no difficulty at all and steps into the cold, silent rooms.

Katie sits inside, curled up in the hated futon-armchair. He’d suspected he’d find her here. She looks tired and worn, but somehow happy as well. He doesn’t miss the circlet of pearls around her neck. She glances up at him as he comes in; her eyes are bright and clear. “Is he – ?”

“Dead,” Arthur interrupts. “But I got there in time.” A small smile breaks across her face; for the first time in months she looks truly beautiful, carefree. “Wayne?”

The smile slides neatly into a grin. “He’s with me,” she confirms, unravelling herself out of the chair and walking across the room to stand beside him. “He’s fine. I’m guessing the fact we’re all still down here told you that already.”

“There was a funeral,” he says, quietly. “Alfred came.” She looks at him quickly, but he clarifies; “His projection, I think. I’m certain he didn’t know who I am.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, softly, and means it. There’s a brief, silent pause; then she rolls her eyes skyward, lets out a tiny, exasperated laugh. “We’re going to _Florence_.”

Arthur holds back a flinch, gives her a tight smile. “Give it a day,” he says, “and then – ”

She sends him a cool look. “I know.” She holds up her hand; a piece of paper sits between her first and middle finger, folded up small. “Wayne told me to give you this,” she continues, arcing one eyebrow. “Says you’ll need some ropes, and that you might like what you find.”

Arthur takes the paper from her hand, unfolds it; a set of co-ordinates. He feels his dry mouth open a little, and he knows on instinct what it is he’ll find there. On the very edge of his mind, he hears the words _‘I will not steal from Wayne’_. His limbs feel heavy and numb.

He’s jolted back to himself by the press of Katie’s hand on his arm; he smiles weakly, shakes his head. “Enjoy Firenze,” he says as she stoops down to fetch her handbag.

She sends him a quick, wicked grin. “I’ll see you on the other side,” she replies, and with a final, mock-regal wave, she slinks noiselessly from his apartment with a quiet click of the door.

 

 

Arthur has a little time.

He steals, rather than rents, a car. Gotham without Wayne is just about struggling back onto his feet; but such a small crime in the midst of all this carnage won’t be noticed. He drops the GPS device on the seat beside him, and follows its instructions through the city, into the countryside around, along tiny, rickety lanes that morph into winding dirt tracks before eventually melting away into farmland.

He parks the car on the side of the road, slings the bag with the ropes across his chest. He picks up the GPS and heads off into the trees. Occasionally in his slow, winding route it chirrups, prompting him to turn a little to the right or left. He’s as much guided by it as the a soft, quiet chatter in front of him, growing louder and louder into a roar as he continues on his way; eventually he comes out into a mossy clearing, faced by a huge, churning waterfall, already slapping his face sharply with spray. The GPS hums a long, low note; if it had been of the speaking variety, a cool, clear voice would have told him he has _reached his destination_. He glances down at it, frowns a little, stuffs it into his bag and reaches down for the ropes.

He lands heavily on a pile of shale; the sharp rocks bring him out in a plethora of tiny cuts, stinging acidly in the waterfall’s icy spray. The air in the cave is sharp, and ice-cold, and smells beautifully fresh. He starts a little way inside by the ersatz light that filters in through the waterfall, but when his eyes fail him he digs around in his bag for his torch instead.

When he lights it, the black air around him comes alive.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If I could, I'd cast [Richard Ayoade](http://www1.pictures.zimbio.com/gi/Richard+Ayoade+Submarine+Portraits+2011+Sundance+YATBZXtqkKTl.jpg) as Dax.

Arthur opens his eyes. A hand rests on his own; small and soft. Mal’s, he realises, and he lets the room swim into focus around him.

Wayne lies motionless on the bed; aside from him, they are alone. She flashes him a small, warm smile, pulls the IV from his arm. “You just missed Katie,” she says, nodding across to the empty chair. He glances across at the PASIV device on the bed; two minutes on the clock. “Arthur,” she begins, her voice tight, but he shakes his head.

“Not here,” he says, fighting the urge to close his eyes.

She hands him her gun. “See you up above,” she replies, and he nods, tries unsuccessfully to echo her smile.

 

 

The second awakening plays havoc with his senses; his brain feels thick and clumsy, every nerve disorientated. He sits up slowly, rubs at his eyes, winces a little at the aches that noisily make themselves known to him. A second hand rests on his arm, larger, rougher, warmer. Eames’. He nearly collapses from the relief of it.

Across the room, Mal and Wayne lie unconscious still, their lines to the PASIV still live. Alfred hovers on the sidelines, nervous; there’s no sign of Katie, but he’s certain she’s been and gone. He glances up at Eames, but before he has the chance to open his mouth Mal is stirring across the room and Eames breaks away from his side, starts to pack up the PASIV in quick, methodical movements.

Arthur stands slowly, stretches some of the pain from his limbs. “Time to go,” Eames says, and Arthur looks up to see Mal on her feet beside Eames.

He nods once, looks across at Alfred. “You know where to find us,” Arthur says to him, and together the three of them leave the room, wind their way through the quiet, empty mansion.

There’s a car waiting for Mal on the edge of Wayne’s estate; rough, jagged tire marks in the mud by the road betray that another had been parked behind it, taken by Katie, he presumes. They wait beside it as Eames jumpstarts the engine, and though Arthur would much rather walk Mal refuses to leave without at least one of them in her passenger seat.

Eames calls shotgun, so Arthur ducks into the back seat; and though he wishes he could say the silence of the journey is comfortable in truth it is far from it. By the time they’ve hit the outskirts of the city it’s lasted too long to be broken idly, and he feels almost suffocated, desperate to get out of the sharp smell of sweat and leather and breathe true, fresh air again.

Mal drops them a block away from Eames’ apartment. Eames himself is out of the car in a flash, rustling through his pocket for his keys, but Mal detains Arthur for a moment with a quiet look in the rear-view mirror; he scoots forward on the creaky, smooth leather, says, “not now, I’ll call,” and in flagrant invitation of the wrath of Mallorie Cobb quickly joins Eames on the sidewalk. The car loiters for a moment, as if she’s tempted to start an argument, but after a handful of heartbeats it pulls away.

Arthur looks around the city, feels the weight of its air settle lightly on his shoulders. The last time he walked down this road its shops were trashed and burned, its occupants dead or fled, its sidewalks littered with broken debris and bodies. He resists the urge to shrug off his jacket; the air feels unseasonably warm.

He glances at Eames for a moment, standing stoic and impassive at his side, then looks back down the road. Arthur knows regardless of what he remembers it is far, far worse for Eames.

 

 

Arthur calls first shower when they get back to the apartment, and he spends a moment before he gets in ramping up the spray til it’s almost scalding, as hot as he can stand; he lets it fall harshly down on his scalp and his shoulders, tries to shake some of the fear from his mind, but he finds that no matter how long he stands there his bones still feel cold.

He shuts off the shower, climbs out, enjoys the alien luxury of Eames’ obnoxiously fluffy pastel towels. He dresses slowly, wipes the foggy condensation off the mirror, and leaves the bathroom to let Eames follow him in, and when he balances against the kitchen table in a new set of clothes he has to admit to feeling a little fresher than before.

The apartment feels strange around him, an uncomfortable second skin; it feels as if years have passed since he stood there last, but the fridge is still occupied with the half-eaten remnants of the pizza from the night before; the bed is still rumpled and unmade; Eames’ abandoned mug of tea still sits on the side, cold and a little fuzzy round the edges of the mug. They’ve been gone for less than twenty-four hours in all.

The hiss of the shower stops; the wet slap of bare feet on tile. Eames enters the room, his sleep-mussed suit discarded in favour of jumper and jeans. Arthur takes a moment to look him up and down, and finds with a little fear he finds it almost impossible to read him.

“You hungry?” Arthur asks for the sake of something to say. Eames’ eyes flick across the room; he seems to notice Arthur anew. He shakes his head, but he comes across the room to stand in front of Arthur, so close their bodies touch from hip to shoulder, and Arthur closes his eyes, rests his forehead against Eames’ collarbone, feels some of the chill chased from his veins. He can hear the faint thud of Eames’ heartbeat; he can still remember a time when he never thought he’d have that warmth again.

Eames pulls back, the smallest of smiles on his face, and says, “I could go for a cup of tea, though.”

Arthur spends a few minutes in the kitchen arguing with their awful plastic kettle (a constant through all of his and Eames’ apartments) and when he returns to their dining room-cum-lounge Eames is sat on the sofa, his eyes fixed on the blank TV screen but his gaze firmly inward. Arthur hands him the mug in silence, sits down beside him with his own. He can feel some of the tiredness bleed out of him with each mouthful of the hot, strong coffee he drinks.

Eames finishes his mug, sets it down on a side-table and settles back against the sofa, rubbing his eyes. “I told Alfred we’d stay for a few days,” Arthur says when the silence grows so thick he fears it’ll suffocate him. “But after that we should get out of Gotham. Go someplace foreign and hot.”

Eames glances over at him, nods once; his lips twist in a wry, humourless smile. “I vote Singapore,” he murmurs, closing his eyes. “Or Corfu. Or Malaga.”

Arthur frowns a little. “You hate Malaga,” he says; Eames’ grin grows, but he doesn’t reply. Arthur pauses, his mind clogged with the hundreds of things he’s been itching to ask, itching to say, for months – but his throat is hard and tight, and he can’t force his mouth open, can’t speak. “Eames,” Arthur manages, eventually, his voice ridiculously soft. “When did it happen?”

Eames opens his eyes; his face is sombre and hard. “Not long after I left you,” he replies, his voice worn. “Though I suppose it started a little before.” His eyes flitter around the room, skittish. “I presume you realised when I dropped Wayne in a prison in Jodhpur rather than put a bullet in his brain,” he says, and whilst his tone is light and carefully blithe he won’t meet Arthur’s eye. He remembers everything, Arthur realises, and the knowledge twists an ice-cold knife in his gut. Every last second.

 

 

They spend the following few days caged up in the apartment, relying on what few supplies they have and calling for takeout when those fall flat. The air in there is stifling, but whenever Arthur tries to venture into the city it feels stagnant and rotten, makes a hot, roiling nausea crawl across his skin. He’s seen this city alight; he’s seen its inhabitants strewn dead across its roads.

He can’t imagine what it must be like for Eames, knowing himself to have been the cause.

There’s a festering wound rotting in the center of Eames’ mind, deep down where Arthur cannot reach. Arthur has sewn him up more times than he can count in the years they’ve known one another; he can only trust himself to find the words eventually. He always has before. For now, he lives in fear that he might say something that causes Eames to take flight, and when Arthur chases after he won’t be able to find him again.

The echoes he saw of Bane in the weeks before they went down are mostly gone, now; purged, he supposes, by the job. Eames is still terse of speech and calm of temper, different to how he used to be, but being in a room with him doesn’t set Arthur’s nerves on edge the way it did before; and he leans into Arthur’s touch, rather than accepting it with blank indifference. Eames will fumble tiny movements, as if his muscles feel alien to him; he’ll stare at his hands, as if he can’t work out why they’re so small; he’ll run his fingers through his hair, pinch and bite at his lips until they’re raw. Arthur thinks he must feel alien in his own skin.

He catches him, every once in a while, staring blank-faced out of the window, the lower half of his hand cupped crablike over his face like a mask. When Arthur reaches down, touches his fingers lightly on Eames’ shoulder, shakes him from his rêverie, Eames won’t remember he’s been doing it at all.

 

 

Their third night home plays host to a thunderstorm, unseasonably ferocious and entirely unannounced. Arthur is jolted awake at 2 a.m. by the sharp _crak-thoom_ of thunder, and he reaches out blindly beside him to find Eames already gone from the bed.

He finds him on the balcony, waiting for the rain to fall, the air thick and heavy with the promise of it. He thinks of the last time they stood here; _you just have to tell me, and we’ll go_. He wants to say those words again, but he wants to jump back those few, small days and insist that they leave even more. He stands with him in silence until the storm moves out over their heads, chased by the heavy chatter of raindrops on tile and stone. He knows he should have something to say.

He doesn’t need to fear for long. When he wakes again in the morning, Eames is gone.

 

 

Alfred doesn’t take long to call. He’s a different man to the last time he knocked on Arthur’s door; his eyes are happy and bright, his face alive with a smile, and he ducks into Eames’ apartment looking as if he’s about to burst into song.

“He left for the airport this morning,” Alfred says. “Didn’t tell me where he was going, and frankly I couldn’t care less.” He hands Arthur the black leather satchel he’s grasping in one hand. “I’d give you ten times that if you asked for it, I really would.”

Arthur smiles, but he knows it probably sits weak and thin on his face. “Thanks,” he says as he takes it, and leaves alone him in the lounge for a moment to store it securely in Eames’ safe in the bedroom. “Can I get you a drink?” he asks as he walks.

“No, just passing, thanks,” Alfred calls after him cheerily. “Thinking I might take a holiday myself. Is Mr. Eames about, by the way?”

Arthur’s hands stutter on the safe’s keypad. “No,” he replies, eventually, hoping his voice sounds flat. “He’s – out. Working.” He slots the satchel in the safe, clicks closed the door, spends a moment reassembling his face and steps back into the lounge, the epitome of neutral and calm.

“Shame,” Alfred says with a tsk, but he looks fairly unconcerned. “Should’ve liked to thank him as well. And that Katie girl, too, but she took right off before you lot had even woken up.” Arthur bites back a humourless laugh; he can’t say he blames her. “Still, no rest for the wicked and all. Pass on my best wishes when you see him, won’t you?”

Arthur forces a smile. “I will.”

He sees Alfred to the door, who’s whistling something bright and cheery under his breath; he wishes Arthur good-day, insists he must tell him if he’s ever in Gotham again so he can drag him out for a drink. Arthur takes it all with a gracious, flattering smile, and waits to drops the deadlock after he’s all but shoved Alfred through the door. He presses his back against the cold, hard wood and slides down to the floor, his head in his hands.

 

 

The next thing Arthur knows he’s hitting the tarmac at LAX and dropping into Mal’s warm arms. She takes him home without a question asked, and though the kids practically think it’s Christmas when they find he’s come to stay (he does, he admits, have somewhat of a history of turning up with monstrously expensive presents) she ushers him past them, shoves him into the guest bedroom and leaves him alone, locks the door behind her without a sound.

He doesn’t see her again until the morning. The house is silent when he leaves the sanctuary of his room, freshly-showered and not feeling the bite of jet-lag too sharply; the air wraps around him warmly, rich with the smell of coffee and Mal’s perfume. He traces it to the kitchen, finds her idly flicking through a recipe book with one hand, her hair spilling loose around her face and her body wrapped up in a bright yellow sundress. She looks beautiful.

She smiles at him as she comes in, turns to wrestle a mug of coffee out of the high-tech machine dominating the kitchen counter; Dom’s always been a sucker for gadgets. He tries not to think of Miranda Tate as she presses it into his hands.

“Dom’s taken the children,” she says, retrieving her abandoned cookbook and slotting it back on the rather empty bookshelf, more dominated by photo frames and plant pots than its own kind. “You stay as long as you need to.”

He nods once; his eyes are locked on the garden, warm and inviting through the window. “Sorry for imposing,” he says, and she chuckles a little, shakes her head; then her face softens, and her eyes turns grim.

“I thought you’d come,” she says, softly. “I hoped you wouldn’t have to.” He smiles wryly, wants to say something along the lines of _me too_ ; but he finds the words get stuck in his throat, and he takes a swig of the coffee instead, too much and too fast, wincing as it burns the roof of his mouth, the back of his tongue. “I wasn’t worried, at first, when we were under,” she continues, her finger drawing nonsensical, sweeping patterns in the counter top. “I didn’t think a few more minutes would hurt. Then I realised for you it was hours, and days, and maybe even months, and...” She trails off, looks up at him, the question on the edge of her tongue; _what happened?_

“About four months,” Arthur says roughly, pressing his palms into the hot ceramic of the mug. “Give or take.”

She nods, and the press of her gaze is so intent Arthur swears he can feel it on his skin. “I thought about coming down,” she admits, and before she can continue Arthur cuts her off with a dry, humourless laugh, a harsh, cruel sound that he instantly regrets. She doesn’t deserve his malice, he thinks. He has no one but himself to blame.

 

 

He spends three weeks with them without speaking a word, getting up in the early afternoon, raiding the backs of their bookcases for abandoned paperbacks and cracking the spines at 2 a.m., watching far too much daytime TV, living on a diet of leftovers and junk food. He walks the streets at dawn, as the city wakes, and it feels painfully noisy and raw around him. The weather seems hot and harsh, as if he’s in Mombasa in July, not LA in September, but it still can’t chase the numbing cold from his bones, twined like fog around his lungs.

It takes a while, but he eventually drags himself out of sweatpants and rollnecks and back into three piece suits; he cares for the kids when he can, partly because it’s useful and partly because there’s only so much being cooped up around the house even he can take. By the time he decides to leave the weather is turning to fall, the hot, muggy L.A. air feeling a little crisper on his skin. He has a rumour of a job in Singapore, and if he doesn’t start again soon he knows he won’t start at all.

He ducks out of the house one quiet afternoon, spends a few hours at the nearby mall and comes back laden with presents for the four of them, his throat tangled and choked around an apology and going for the material substitute in its stead. Mal’s waiting for him when he returns, a knowing look on her face and one perfect eyebrow raised. He can hear Dom’s soft voice down the hall; putting the kids to bed, he guesses. She guides him into the lounge with one hand on his arm, and when he sinks down onto the deep leather sofa something inside of him cracks. He drops his head into his hands, and he tells her everything.

He’s finished long before Dom turns up; he’s even stopped crying, ugly, hot, disgusting tears, though he know Dom will see it in his face. His eyes feel tight and raw, but there’s a tiny knot of tension in his gut that’s loosened just a little, and from that alone he can’t bring himself to care.

“Are you sure it’s safe for you to be working again?” Dom says; he’s unaware of the details, but he’s experienced enough to recognise the signs of a job gone wrong. “You can stay longer if you want to.” Dom’s bedside manners are far worse than his wife’s – he sounds condescending without meaning to, and it rankles Arthur’s blood. Arthur shrugs once, mutters something about facing his demons; the air of the room suddenly feels tight and smothering. He leaves the two of them to talk it through, wonders how much of it Mal will tell.

 

 

He drops neatly back into routine, maintains a steady cycle of jobs. Extractions and the like, obviously; he’s not about to try inception again. He works point for most of them, dabbles at architect when the team’s running a little dry, but he knows point’s where he’s most comfortable, and for the moment comfort is pretty high on his priorities.

He bumps quite by accident into Katie in Kraljevica. He’s loitering harmlessly by a tourist information point at the beaches at Ostro when he spots her first, and she sees him half a heartbeat later; her eyes drift past him casually, as if he’s no one she knows, but he knows their art better than that. Arthur spends a heartbeat longer than he needs to pressed up against the info booth, wondering what to do; he knows they can’t have the easy camaraderie of ex-colleagues that this job occasionally affords. With anyone else he’d find their hotel, offer to go for beer or coffee depending on their tastes, but he knows that’s far from fitting with her. For all he knows she might never want to see him again, and he can’t say he blames her.

He’s in Croatia for business rather than pleasure, and thus the evening is still quite young when he gets back to his hotel room and finds her perched on the side of his bed, flipping through something or other on her sleek black cellphone. “You here to check up on me?” he asks, walking across the room and resting his jacket across the back of the armchair.

“To give you my new number,” she replies, and holds out a folded piece of paper, caught between her index finger and thumb; the déjà vu gives him chills. “And to check up on you,” she admits, her smile a little cheeky, drops the paper on the bed. “Eames not with you?” she asks, too casually; Arthur has to clench himself against the familiar loss that rips through his gut.

“No,” he replies, and it’s probably not as calm as it should be. “He isn’t.”

She stands, gathering her trenchcoat and handbag from where they rest beside her on the bed. The red in her hair is fainter than before; the brown of her roots is showing through. She looks happy, he decides, and he’s glad of it. She crosses the room, rests her hand lightly on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she says, softly, and he nods once, a jerky, final movement, his eyes locked on a mouldy spot of wall just to the right of the window. “Call me if you need anything, okay?” she says, after a long, tense pause. “Not a job, though,” she turns to add as she walks out the door. “I never want to work with you again.”

He can’t help but smile a little. He unfolds the crumpled piece of paper, pulls out his phone to punch it in; no messages, he sees. No missed calls. He opens up his contacts, and his thumb hesitates for a moment over _Eames_ , but then he scrolls on past down to edit _Katie Stone_.

 

 

He doesn’t know for sure that Eames is still alive until he works with a guy called Dax in Budapest. He’s of the tall, skinny stock Eames would affectionately call “beanpole”, with dark skin, a mass of fuzzy black hair and a pair of wide, horn-rimmed hipsterish glasses perched over his dark brown eyes. He’s British, and although Eames often reminds him it’s obnoxious to assume everyone from England knows the Queen Arthur can’t help but think they know one another the moment he meets him.

It’s not Arthur’s team; he’s working under an acquaintance from the military, one Carter Andrews whom Dax has an intense disliking for that he’s just about willing to tolerate for the size of their promised paycheck. Though he keeps quiet about it, Arthur has to admit the words obnoxious and arrogant were invented to use for men like Andrews.

Arthur’s on point, and Dax is their architect, but he’s admitted an unfamiliarity with typical Bohemian-era Hungarian architecture and bowed down to Arthur’s superior expertise; in short, they spend perhaps more time together than the usual requirement, and when the team dissolves after the extraction is done Arthur takes him out for a drink. Andrews, needless to say, never receives an invitation.

The talk falls to past teams and previous jobs, as is often the case with their field; many of them have not had anything resembling a personal life for years. He learns in the cab ride there that Dax has just come from an extraction in Nairobi, and Arthur’s rather unsubtly pressing him for details the moment they settle down in the bar, glass in hand.

“We did have a thief, actually,” Dax says, taking a sip of his pint, unperturbed by Arthur’s questioning. “British guy. Name of Eames. Do you know him? He’s bloody good.”

Arthur’s mouth goes dry. “We’ve worked together before,” he says, his voice a little rough. “He doing okay?”

“Fine,” Dax replies, waving his hand. “I’ve known him since uni – lived next to each other in halls. He’s quieter now,” he adds, after a moment’s thought. Then he pauses, throws Arthur a long look, and asks, “you’re not _that_ Arthur, are you?”, but before Arthur has the chance to reply a very angry Carter Andrews is barrelling across the bar straight for them.

 

 

A full year and a half passes before Arthur goes Stateside again, and when he does it’s only because Mal calls.

 _“Dom wants to start dreaming again,”_ she says over a thin and scratchy telephone line. _“I need you to get us a PASIV.”_

She picks him up from the airport as before, puts her arm through his with a soft, warm smile. She doesn’t drive him to their home; they hit the freeway instead, heading south towards San Diego, and pull off somewhere in Westminster, continuing on foot to the shady back room of a Parisian-style bar tucked down a broad, quiet road which constitutes here as a ‘side street’.

Arthur has a whiskey in front of him; Mal, nothing. He drinks it in slow, even sips, enjoys the way it raises gooseflesh on his arms, shudders down his spine. “Is this really such a good idea?” he asks, eventually.

She sends him a sly look. “I should have known the price would be a lecture,” she murmurs, but she smiles a little, ducks her head. “James starts school on Tuesday,” she adds, as if by way of explanation; Arthur can’t say it calms the worry in his gut. She notices his indecision, changes tactics. “Dom misses it, though he doesn’t like to admit it. It’ll be good for him.”

Arthur shakes his head, rubs his eyes. “What do you even want to do with it? You taking jobs again?”

She sits back in her chair, her small smile triumphant, and Arthur knows he should be annoyed at her. “No,” she replies. “Your Wayne job got him thinking. He wants to look at levels again. He wants to see how far down he can get.”

Arthur looks at her. “That doesn’t sound safe.”

She shrugs. “You can’t have come here expecting us to want something safe.”

Arthur sighs, resigned; he knows he’s merely the easiest way for the Cobbs to get their hands on a PASIV, and at least he knows the one he has is legitimate. He’s lost far too many friends to dodgy tech. Arthur puts his hand in his pocket, slides a key across the worn lacquer of the wooden table. “To a locker in Dodger Stadium. Name of William Thompson.”

She smiles wryly. “Subtle,” she murmurs, amused, and pockets it.

They leave the bar together, loitering for a moment on the sidewalk outside as Mal rummages in her purse for her keys. She makes him promise to come to dinner, but he insists on putting himself up in a motel on the other side of town, adamant that he’s capable of looking after himself for two whole days. He stops her with a hand on her arm just as she begins to climb into the car. “Thank you,” he says, quietly, eyes locked earnestly on hers. “For letting me stay, before. I was – ”

“ – in trouble,” she finishes, easily. “More than you realised at the time, I think,” she adds, her voice turning soft. She shakes her head, smiles. “You don’t need to ask. You should know that.” He smiles, shrugs a little, looks away, but he can feel the way her gaze still rests on him, hot and insistent. “I hear Eames is in Montreal,” she says quietly, after a pause, and Arthur feels his mouth run dry. “Have you – ? ”

“No,” he says smoothly, eyes locked firmly on the sidewalk, his body one tight, tense line. She stares at him for a moment as if she’s going to press, but then she nods a little, turns back towards her car. “See you at eight,” he says as she climbs inside, and she nods curtly as she pulls away.

He watches her leave in silence, standing on the sidewalk until she’s out of his sight. Her car reaches the end of the street, turns left, and he ducks back inside the bar to call himself a cab, trying to ignore the odd lurch of his heartbeat that had begun unmistakeably at the mention of Eames.

 

 

He picks up a job of Nash’s in Cyprus; poor pay and poorer company, but he needs the excuse to get out of the States now he knows for certain Eames is on the same continent as him. Nash shoots him an odd, knowing look when he lands but Arthur keeps quiet, bites his tongue, wraps up the job in half the time Nash thought it would take and gets on the first flight he can through to Greece.

He hops around Europe for a while, working his way north for no reason in particular; Tirana; Dubrovnik; Salzburg; a brief sojourn west into Bratislava; then Prague; Hamburg; Odense. He reaches Helsinki five months after flying out of L.A. and pauses, partly because he loves the city and partly because it’s hurtling towards Christmas-time and sometimes even he feels he needs a break.

The last time he’d been in Finland he’d been with Eames. They’d hardly even known each other; not the first job they’d worked together, but maybe the second or third. They’d gone for a quiet drink in a crisp, clean bar after the job was done; not dissimilar, truthfully, to the one he’d shared with Dax in Budapest.

Arthur loiters for a while outside one of the rare tourist shops clustered against the cold near Senate Square, its clutter of postcards and tourist tat spewing across the pavement an odd contrast to the solemn, stately buildings around it. He eyes up the lurid display, stamping his feet a little against the cold, thinking of that night with Eames in the Finnish bar; the swagger of his gait, the ease of his smile. It feels like decades ago.

He’s unaware of where Eames is now; but for Christmas he’ll go back to London. With his network, Arthur could find out how and where with no trouble at all, could be with him for New Year’s Eve.

A light snow begins to settle around his shoulders; Arthur reaches a hand up to his hair, ruffles a few flakes from out of it. He turns and walks back up the street, tries to ignore the way a half-remembered dream makes his hackles rise, the fresh flurries of snow twirling like smoke in his wake.

 

 

By the time he next sees Eames, Mal is dead.

Arthur checks in alone to a grotty L.A. motel room the night before the funeral. Dom is long since gone, hiding underground with a friend of Arthur’s in New Delhi, and once Arthur’s done everything he can do here to help him he’s flying out to join him in India. As far as he’s aware, no one else knows Arthur is here. He was alone in Helsinki when he got the call; he spent all night ringing in every favour from every person in his phonebook, and when it finally became clear there was nothing he could do he was the one who had to call to Dom and convince him to run.

The new morning has a sky of seedy, miserable grey, struck through occasionally with thin, insipid sunshine. Arthur sits in the middle of his lumpy motel bed with the red die in the palm of his hand, rolling it around between his fingertips. He’s dressed in a sharp black suit he hardly wears with shoes that pinch; he glances to one side at the dog-eared, ratty alarm clock. He has a little time.

He’s running late by the time he reaches the cemetery; he’s missed most of the service. The groundsman points him in the right direction, and though he sets out with a sharp pace when he catches sight of two little figures in the crowd, impossibly small and clad in funeral-black, he turns and goes back the way he came.

He comes down to stand at the graveside after the others have gone. The gravedigger had passed him on his way down, touching the brim of his leaf-green hat as he went by; he is on his own by the neat patch of dirt, the air still curled with the fresh scent of overturned earth, his back snapped ramrod straight, his glazed eyes locked on the bright white stone. He’s seen Mal die a thousand times, but this is the first – and only – time he’s ever seen her dead.

He hears a quiet noise behind him, and Eames is at his side. “I’m so sorry, love,” he says softly, resting his hand at the small of Arthur’s back, presses his lips to Arthur’s temple, quick and light. Arthur shudders once, lets his shoulders slump and fall, and with Eames beside him it’s suddenly as easy as breathing.

 

 

Even in March, Siena is swelteringly hot. Arthur has never had the displeasure of Italy in August, and when even the late spring heat is covering him in a cloying, pricking sweat he’s thankful for it. He is ostensibly here on vacation; but if there happens to be a rare-ish Donatello in the Duomo and a contact or two in the vicinity he can’t be blamed for taking advantage of them.

He comes into the city proper on foot; though they’re technically out of season the air around him swarms with the light-hearted chat of American tourists, thinly interspersed with the slightly more abrasive conversations of the locals. When he reaches the bright expanse of the Piazza del Duomo he steps into the road in the midst of a group of suicidal Italians before skipping up the cool marble steps two at a time.

He’s halfway around the galleries when he gets the call. It almost makes him jump; he’d forgotten his cellphone was in his pocket altogether. He flips it out, glances down at the screen: _unknown caller_. He sighs, winds past a grim-looking bronze of a grizzled general, and hits the button. “Dom?” he hazards, pirouetting neatly around a cluster of German tourists.

 _“Wayne’s back in Gotham,”_ is Eames’ reply, and Arthur feels his heart stutter in his throat, his blood run cold. He falters to a halt beside _The Feast of Herod_ and slumps down onto a cold stone bench to one side, lets the cellphone fall from his face and hang limply in his hand. 

Arthur thinks of a winter he spent alone in Gotham, of the hard, reptilian glint of Bane’s eye.

They failed.

 _“Arthur?”_ he hears distantly, crackling out of nowhere, and Arthur’s jolted back to the present, to the phone dangling loosely in his fingers. He closes his eyes, sucks in a sharp breath, and raises the phone to his ear once more.

“I’m here,” he says quietly. “I’m – ” _sorry_ , he wants to say, but he finds his throat closes up around the word, forces it back.

 _“I know,”_ Eames says, softly, a thousand miles away, and Arthur rubs fiercely at his eyes with one hand, sees stars burst and fade behind his eyelids. _“Are you really in Italy right now?”_ Eames asks, after a pause, and Arthur smiles in spite of himself, feels the way it spreads warmth right through him.

“Mr. Eames,” he murmurs, grinning, “are you spying on me?”

A pause. Then; _“You’re staying at the Palazzo Ravizza hotel. There’s a bar across the road. Ask for Mariano, say John Arnstead is a friend of yours.”_

Arthur can’t help a laugh. “And what’s that going to get me?” he asks, wryly. “A drink on the house or a punch in the face?”

Eames chuckles, low and warm, and the noise hits Arthur like a suckerpunch; it’s been years since he heard Eames laugh. He’s not seen anything of him since the funeral, half a year ago, when they’d silently parted ways the moment they left the cemetery; and before that it had been years. Almost three whole years in all, since Wayne, since Gotham, since Bane, and a job that had all been for nothing in the end.

 _“I should go,”_ Eames says, eventually, and Arthur thinks he must imagine reluctance in his voice.

Arthur nods, though he knows (although not with certainty) that Eames can’t see him. “Must be about lunchtime for you,” he replies absently, dragging himself to his feet, running his eye across the other half-interested occupants of the gallery; he’s half-thinking about security cameras and burglar alarms and shift changes.

There’s a quiet pause in which he’s uncertain whether Eames is amused or disturbed; then, quietly, he says, _“I should have known I couldn’t hide from you,”_ and though there’s amusement lilting his tone there’s a heavy seriousness behind the words that knocks the breath from in him.

 

 

 _“I need you to come out to Osaka,”_ Dom says. _“I’ve got a job and I want you on point.”_

Arthur had come to Italy to get away from Cobb, for a breath of air after four months of being hounded out of safehouse after safehouse in India and another three hunkered down in Pakistan. As far as he was aware, Cobb had planned to go back to Calcutta after Arthur left; why or how he went to Japan is anyone’s guess.

Arthur shouldn’t go; he knows that. Dom Cobb has a tendency to land him in trouble. But he’d been a mess when Arthur had left him, a week and a half ago, and after his conversation with Eames Arthur can’t ditch the uneasy feeling he’s outstayed his welcome here.

If Dom had looked rough when Arthur left him it’s nothing to how he looks now. It’s internal, now, rather than external as before; there’d been an unpleasant few weeks where he’d refused to so much as wash or shave, and in India’s climate Arthur had almost dragged him to the shower himself, but when he meets Arthur off the red-eye into Kansai International he’s dressed smartly in a button-down shirt and loose grey slacks and it’s something in his eyes which looks ragged and worn.

Nash is waiting for them in a car out front, and Arthur’s stomach sinks at the sight of him. He waits until Nash is lugging his bags up the tiny, rickety staircase to Dom’s third floor apartment to shoot Dom a sceptical look, and say, “Nash? Really?”

Dom glances at him, shrugs. “He’s all I could get.” He looks distracted, nervous, one eye always back over his shoulder, and Arthur’s gut twists to see him so weatherworn. Mal had been haunting his dreams when Arthur left; Arthur now wonders whether he dreams at all.

“Who’s the mark?” Arthur asks.

“The head of Proclus Global,” Dom replies, his eyes still flicking nervously up and down the street; Arthur wonders whether he was this tense, back when he was trapped in Gotham. “Saito. His name is Saito.”

 

 

Arthur hasn’t seen Paris in half a decade, and it doesn’t take him long to remember why. Five minutes off the plane and his lungs are thick with tar, he’s got the headache from hell and, just to top it all, his wallet’s been stolen.

He doesn’t have an apartment in Paris; the last time he was here he’d relied on using Eames’. He supposes he still could, seeing as Eames is in Mombasa and Arthur knows where he hides the spare key; but the idea of rattling around in those bleak, empty rooms makes his stomach churn. Besides, he should probably be keeping a closer eye on Dom than that.

When Cobb announces Eames is joining them after all, Arthur can’t shake the feeling he’s dodged a bullet there somehow.

He isn’t there to meet Eames off the plane. He isn’t even there the first time Eames turns up at the warehouse. Arthur walks in one day to find him relaxing in a low-slung swivel chair, his nose in a pile of papers spread-eagled across his lap and his feet propped up against a desk. Arthur’s desk, obviously, and he doesn’t doubt for a second that Eames knows it.

Dom glances up as he comes in. “Good,” he says, bluntly, re-occupying himself with his laptop. “I need you to take Ariadne and Eames to lunch.”

Arthur feels his lips twitch into a smirk; Eames looks up, appalled. “But I’ve been so well-behaved,” he protests, his voice bordering on whiny. “I’ve hardly said a thing since I got here.” Dom sends him a cool, flat look, and says nothing.

“I know a place,” Arthur says, amused, and Eames glances at him sullenly, mutters something about fetching his coat.

Cobb looks over at him when Eames has gone. _You don’t mind?_ , he asks, silently; he looks exhausted and worn, and Arthur shakes his head. He’s an adult; he can deal.

They actually end up following Ariadne to a tiny café, seeing as Arthur’s knowledge of Paris is limited at best and she seems to know the city like the back of her hand. “They do good strudel,” she informs them as they walk out the door, and they find themselves settling into comfortable chairs under a bright, sunny-yellow umbrella in a quiet part of town.

“You can’t have tried everywhere,” Ariadne protests, dabbing at her mouth with a hideously floral napkin, the remnants of a generously-sized baguette splayed across her plate. “It’s a huge country.”

Eames smiles into his hand, picking ineffectually at a half-abandoned croque madame. “Name somewhere,” he replies. “I guarantee you Arthur will have been.”

She narrows her eyes; she doesn’t know him, can’t tell when Eames is poking fun. She pauses for a moment, thinking, and then says “Lecce.”

“Too hot,” Arthur replies, instantly.

She frowns. “Bolzano.”

“Too cold.”

“Genoa?”

“I got shot in Genoa,” Arthur says, dryly. “Twice.”

“Venice.”

Arthur wrinkles his nose. “Mosquitoes.”

“Bologna.”

“Shot again,” Arthur says, and Eames laughs, soft and warm. “Punctured a lung.”

“Capri?” she hazards.

Eames snorts once, cuts in. “Please, dear, Capri is characterless. It’s the sort of place where you wouldn’t be surprised to find a Tesco’s lurking on a street corner.”

She shoots him a narrow-eyed glare and says, exasperated, “Florence.”

Arthur feels a chill run down his spine, glances away. He can feel the leaden weight of Eames’ gaze. “Been once or twice,” he replies roughly, staring at the floor. “Didn’t take.”

Ariadne slumps back in her chair, defeated, none the wiser of their heavy silence. “I don’t understand,” she mutters sourly. “Everything about you screams Italy.”

“Oh, but that’s Arthur to a t,” Eames replies, his tone lilted with amusement, and when Arthur glances across at him his eyes are warm. “Loves the food, the clothes, the language, the architecture – _adores_ the art – but hates Italy.”

Ariadne hitches one perfect eyebrow. “That’s so – ”

“Contrary?” Eames interrupts, snapping his eyes from Arthur to her and dropping his fork with a satisfying clatter on the table. “Exactly. Contrary is something Arthur suits perfectly.”

“It’s the heat, mostly,” Arthur replies feebly, and when Eames lets out an undignified snort-chuckle Arthur can’t hold back a smile; it cleaves across his face, seems to send warmth shooting right through his bones.

 

 

Arthur has no reason to dream. A point man’s work is based securely in reality; he has nothing to build in the unconscious, no skills or tricks to practice. He has no reason to so much as pick up their PASIV, but when he finds it neatly stowed away in their warehouse long after the others have gone home he finds he can’t resist it.

He dreams of Gotham. This in itself is not unusual; his natural dreams (or the few he has left) often take him there, to its tall, silent streets, the steady slip-crunch of thick snow underfoot, the heavy tang of fear choking the air. Arthur wanders for a while, visits the empty shell of his apartment, the rubble-ridden husk of City Hall. When he hears the soft sounds of Piaf drifting through the silent air he stands on the very edge of a huge metal bridge, its cables and rivets creaking and snapping in the wind, and stares down at the scummy, foamy water, miles below. He jumps.

Eames is beside him when he’s jolted awake, thankfully by the fall rather than the fatal impact to follow. It takes Arthur a moment to spot him, clad as he is in a soft grey suit and leant against the concrete wall, half-swathed in shadows; he schools his expression the moment he does, kicks himself furiously for giving in to a passing weakness before checking thoroughly he was alone.

“Setting up a tutorial for Ariadne,” Arthur lies, sitting up straight and reeling in the line, and he catches sight of Eames’ smile. He thinks it looks almost sad.

“No, you weren’t,” Eames says, softly.

Arthur pauses. He lets the tubes fall slack between his fingers, looks across at him. “No,” he agrees, quietly. “I wasn’t.”

Eames pushes off the wall, pads silent and catlike across the room to stand at Arthur’s side. He pushes his hand into the soft hair on Arthur’s scalp, drags his fingers through the gel, and Arthur closes his eyes, thinks of a Florentine hotel room, years ago. He catches hold of Eames’ wrist, pushes it away, gets to his feet – but Eames stops him with a hand on his arm, and Arthur’s skin practically crackles at the impact. “I did what I needed to,” Eames says, almost a murmur, his tone worn. “I did what I needed to stay sane.”

It isn’t an apology; but Arthur knows he doesn’t deserve one, not truthfully. He’d been in no state to help Eames, had made no move to do so in the days before he left, and he knows with a cool, hard fear that if Eames had stayed the likelihood would be that neither of them would have made it here at all.

They are standing so close Arthur can hear the soft hiss of Eames’ breath, the way his suit jacket rasps across his skin, and the very air seems to press up against them, muggy and hot. “I know,” Arthur replies, keeps his eyes on the floor; he suspects Eames doesn’t miss the way his voice shakes, and he hates himself for it. Eames hushes him softly, pushes a finger under Arthur’s chin, tilts his face up and kisses him, soft and strong.

 

 

They part ways the moment they touch down in LAX. Arthur catches sight of Cobb making it through security, no questions asked; he sees from afar the haunted look in Fischer’s eye, wonders if their hard work will pay off this time around. Then he’s dragging his bag through a bright arrivals lounge, keeping one eye trained on the heavily-armed guards and the other on the exits.

He finds Eames stood just the other side of the huge glass doors, rolling a cigarette deftly between his fingertips. A new habit, Arthur thinks; or perhaps a very old one, unearthed since Eames left Gotham almost three and a half years ago. He pauses in the doorway, just out of Eames’ sight, and watches him, sees the relaxed low slump of his shoulders, the way he shifts his weight lightly, easily from one leg to the other, the lines of age creeping in around his eyes. Bane is not completely gone, Arthur thinks. But he’s almost forgotten.

Arthur flexes his fingers against the handle of his bag; they feel sweaty and warm. He steps out into the thick L.A. air, walks over to Eames, and says, “I take it you need someplace to stay.”

Eames turns to him and smiles.


End file.
